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Gov 2.0

11/10/2013

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, at the BBC. Photo by Documentally.

This is a topic that needs A LOT more commentary, but before it gets lost in my growing, enormous queue of important articles and books to comment on (I need staff! I need fellow bloggers to do this with me!), let me note this.

People worry about the NSA and Snowden's revelations. As you know, I don't think much of them; I don't think they are established, they don't have a case, they are about an anarchist agenda used as a cat's paw by the Kremlin, and ultimately I don't think there's a there there.

The problem with the Panopticon begins with Google and other platforms and that secessionist Silicon Valley, not the NSA, which plays catch-up trying to do the job it was hired to do. We have oversight, checks and balances, remedies, means of reform for the NSA.

We don't have ANY of those things for Google. That's why the NSA is never my primary concern.

I also have a long-term worry about the gnomes of the Internet who are steadily taking over pieces of it, and have really been galvanized now that the Snowden Affair has given them an excuse to kick the US government out of standards bodies and to oppose it in international fora and so on.

Just one year after its foundation in London, an organisation created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee
and Sir Nigel Shadbolt to stimulate economic, environmental and social
innovation through a system of open data sharing and analysis, has
announced rapid global expansion of its ambitions.

The Open Data Institute
has announced the launch of 13 international centres, known as "nodes",
each of which will bring together companies, universities, and NGOs
that support open data projects and communities. The nodes will be based
in the US, Canada, France, Dubai, Italy, Russia, Sweden and Argentina, with two extra US nodes Chicago and North Carolina. Three further UK nodes are to open in Manchester, Leeds and Brighton.

The
new ODI nodes will variously operate at local and national levels. Each
one has agreed to adopt the ODI Charter, which is a open source
codification of the ODI itself, and embodies principles of open data
business, publishing, communication, and collaboration.

But they should, because of its budgets:

The ODI is a non-for-profit organisation that has so far helped set up
more than a dozen open data-based startup companies in the UK,
generating income, research and training. It has also created a certificate for open data allowing all users to access information on many areas such as healthcare, transport, peer-to-peer lending, and energy efficiency. The UK ODI secured £10m funding over five years from the UK innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, $750,000 from global philanthropic investor Omidyar Network
created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. It aims for long-term
sustainability through match funding and direct revenue through
memberships and supporters.

Note the role of Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald's new angel for this new media thing that GG has left the Guardian for.

The other people in the speakers' list will tell you of more budgets, i.e. the CTO for New York City, which has a healthy budget for open this and open that -- which has never given us an app telling us where the toilets of New York City are. (I'm going to have to code one myself, which tells me how long you may be shifting from one foot to the other.)

"Open Data" covers a multitude of sins -- I will come back another day to dissect it. These are the bureaucratic "democratic centralists" of the Wired State. They are the ones who will control your health, education, welfare -- life -- data. Not the NSA.

04/05/2013

Creepy cult TED talk by Beth Noveck. Especially laughable is the notion of the Russian state-owned bank's "crowdsourcing" -- and her preaching against civil society's "antagonism" with government when it gets "transparency".

Basically, I mean these six premises, creating the circumstances where an "advance guard" of revolutionary intellectuals take power of the state through their networks and rule it with "science":

o The gov 2.0 or "open government" movement has never really been democratically decided or sustained any liberal democratic critique; it is a movement of technolosts benefiting themselves first and foremost

o the reputational systems that this movement wants to use for various "Better World" purposes, generally those maintained by Wikipedia, Facebook or LinkedIn, are highly flawed and have technological and political limitations and little ability to opt-out or appeal their tendentious results;

o the "social pressure" that these goverati want to harness through social media can range from the vigilantism of their political networks to Anonymous hacking, and is itself a coercive means of bringing change, usually according to a revolutionary agenda;

o the "automated processes" invoked are decided by coders, without much democratic input, according to the ideology of the network in power;

o the allusions to "participation" or "more voices" are highly stylized and often consist of models like Code for America, which are just ingroups getting together with their networks to force changes without scrutiny or political process;

o there is no grown-up oversight, public or private, of these ideas, as they are mainly concocted in certain think -tanks and railroaded into government offices untouched by any critical process.

All of those things contain the seeds of totalitarianism in them.

Big Brother in Your House -- And Whom Morozov Doesn't Mention or Criticize

@dgolumbia Sounds more like Big Brother in your house as opposed to you firing bureaucrats.

Well, exactly. I've been jumping up and down and yelling about Beth Noveck and her ideas for eight years now. For this reason. It's the seeds of totalitarianism. Everybody needs to fight it or we really do lose our freedoms, as this isn't just some professor -- it's somebody on Obama's transition team who occupies the White House Office of Science and Technology for some years before returning to academe and still remaining a beloved guru of the State Department tech set and many other influential networks.

So...I went to look up Beth Noveck -- I can't keep up all the time! -- after noticing a troubling thing: in his Evgeny Morozov's enormous critique of Silicon Valley, it's as important to see who he doesn't talk about, or mentions in a half-line as it is to see he obsesses about (like Jeff Jarvis or Tim O'Reilly). I guess part of it is "Silicon Alley" doesn't capture his attention as much -- he spent a lot of time in California. Beth Noveck, based in New York City, is eclipsed for him (or in fact he likes some of her ideas). Fred Wilson, who is the entrepreneur who should be mentioned in any great study of technocommunism as the praxis master bringing actual money, thought, and action to a lot of the wacky ideas that would remain in the can without him, gets no mention by Morozov; AnneMarie Slaughter, better known for her "can't have it all" cry against certain kinds of feminism, but actually among the key Twitterati intelligentsia, and now to head the New America Foundation is not mentioned at all; Rebecca MacKinnon, also at NAF and on the board of CPJ, gets just a brief mention of her Internet-centric notions of politics; and Beth Noveck gets only a paragraph or two, although she is an example of someone actually getting to a position of power with these ideas -- she was assistant director to the White House Office on Science and Technology, and is now back at New York Law School (not to be confused with NYU Law School) and very influential.

I first became horrified with Beth Noveck's writings here in 2005 and here, where I talked about the coming collectivization on Web 2.0, and here, where she was speaking in Second Life from her perch at the White House. Last year, I saw her in person at Tech@State and even managed to get a question from the audience through a horrible Twitter backchat filter (the conference hired a live team of geeks to sort through tweets with the hashtags of the conference, and then only use the ones they liked, and then replay the ones they liked and that they felt suited their notion of what should be promoted on a large screen in the conference room, and little screens all over the conference space -- truly awful stuff defeating the free speech of Twitter, of course).

Since she is on the record as saying she wanted to "blow up Congress," I asked Noveck whether he various conceptions were really about circumventing Congress -- some geeks have actually articulated this as a goal, and she has indicated it as a wish. Her answer indicated merely that she had learned the PR speak of saying that she had in mind enhancing democratic governance.

But that's just why all her neo-collectivist ideas are so awful -- they are cloaked in the language of participation, transparency, democracy, good governance, etc. -- but in practice they are an electronic mapping of Leninist democratic centralism and collectivism. Once she, like Shirky, found that the masses that showed up in free unmoderated social media were too unwashed -- on the White House discussion pages they would advocate for marijuana legalization or raise questions about Obama's birthplace -- she then had to figure out how to hang on to the democracy lingo yet still use coded systems to her advantage.

So she devised various bureaucratic methods as any such authoritarian would do long before the Internet was created -- internal groups of friends where the real action was; notices that went out only to those on the list or to those who could muster the patience and determination to follow boring and arcane discussions; simple mutes and bans (especially on Twitter) for those who needed to be filtered out, and so on. When all else fails, there was the 15-day or 30-day or 0-day discussion closing limit on the web-page that would be invoked by her staff at any time.

I view Beth Noveck as one of the most dangerous thinkers in terms of actually installing the Wired State, a state run by elite groups with the Internet and smart gadgets with considerable power to suppress dissent and the free media. Indeed, they already have an embryonic form of it on Twitter and in various group and web networks.

Perhaps the rule is "you can't criticize your fellow NAF fellows" and that's why Morozov, himself a NAF fellow, doesn't have anything to say about some of the characters there. Or maybe he doesn't take women in tech seriously, or women on the East Coast in tech seriously. I do!

Fornicating Dragons of Democracy Experiments

Beth Noveck was in Second Life for a time back in 2005 -- Lawlita was her avatar's name (!) and she formed something called Democracy Island, to do experiments with her class and which was ostensibly "open" and about "open government" but which became rapidly actually "closed" to those who weren't in the invited group (you couldn't visit the island unless she invited you into the group). Now, sure, any university might want to do this to keep out griefers and day-trippers. But then they have the option to put their whole island on invisible in the system, not have it in search, and not pretend they are doing experiments for a Better World that are ostensibly in the public interest and "open".

As one of the more perceptive participants in her class pointed out, in time -- a few months? -- even when she did finally open it up to public access, the island lay fallow. The "Creative Commons License Machine" that was supposed to revolutionize Second Life had cobwebs on it from unuse -- only 30 people had touched its dispense I discovered when I looked at the time because the DRM of Second Life itself engineered into the object menu just worked much, much better for them than Lessig's cult. As my friend who used to be in the groups said, one day he logged on to the empty and deserted island and found, as he put it, "two dragons fornicating" there -- it had become a trysting place for furries without land (furries are people who chose animal avatars, either real or mythical).

So that about summed up "Democracy Island" for me. Fornicating Dragons! Lots of smoke but not too much light!

Beth Noveck continues to make her reputation in so many places for having "revolutionized" the patent system -- although there, she was never able to fully incorporate her system, which basically involved a bureaucratically-centralized system for casting about and filtering in "experts" to work on patents -- basically an online version of "the cadres decide everything" where you have a more efficient way to cast about and filter for cadres and then put them to work. Noveck used her own considerable real-life network or "social graph" to test and include those who "fit". I don't think the system got approved in the end, and in any event, Noveck left the Administration to go back to academe. She then set her sights on the federal rule-making system -- fertile ground to invade as it is arcane and nerdy and perfect to use as a stealth-overthrow operation because most people won't be able to pay attention. Take a system that is supposed to work under democracy, where the candidates to various agencies are appointed by the president, then they hire experts and consultants or keep various civil servants employed in the system -- and they make the rules that enable the implementation of laws. If you don't like a law, break into the rules-making system and see if you can place "civic pressure," i.e. your networked lobbying group of likeminded persons on it, under the guise of "public participation". If anyone cries foul, say "but the people are participating, what, you're against open government"?"

When I see the cult-like political movement in New York City called Working Families getting into budget meetings and calling in new Internet-based "participatory democracy" on budget meetings, I cry foul in the same way -- in fact it was an extended argument about the true meaning of this system with Alex Howard that got him eventually to block me on G+. But if anyone had world enough and time, all they'd have to do is show up alongside the cadres at any of those meetings, and try to insert any other political perspective, and see how "democratic" the "participation" would be...

The Constructed and Collectivized Online Self

Beth Noveck's writings here are what began to trouble me so greatly because she was willing to dispense with the individual so quickly and reconstruct her online:

Avatars are “public” characters,
personalities designed to function in a public and social capacity.
Avatars think and act as members of a community, rather than as private
individuals. Having to construct an avatar in a virtual world not only
allows me to see myself but it demands that I design a personage for
interaction with others

Everything that I had learned from extensive involvement first in the Sims Online, then in Second Life, let me know that this was not true. People bring themselves online and stay intact as individuals with rights. They may manifest as a dragon or as a beautiful 20-year-old female club dancer when in fact they are a 40-year-old postal worker, but it doesn't matter. They manifest a part of their soul and being and it is an extension of who they are. One could argue that the self is constructed offline for interactions -- "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet" as T.S. Eliot said -- but Noveck takes it further -- coded virtual-world systems (of the sort that we will all be living in some day because that's how the Internet of Things and other features of web 3.0 will be managed) *force* you to construct that self. That force-constructed self, of course, is controlled ultimately not by you, but the platform provider, in this case a private company (like Linden Lab is for Second Life, or Facebook, which is a virtual world as well (and now that it is coming as a phone interface, it creates even more virtuality -- or augmented reality, which is also a form of virtuality).

For Noveck, "avatars think and act as members of a community" -- the groupism and collectivism seems to happen as soon as you log on. Of course, in real life, too, you are "think and act as members of a community" in various settings -- the PTA, or the book club or the political party. But these feel less rigid and more easily than the constructed self of the online world. There are various technical exigencies that come to play. Let's say there are the hard limits of the servers dictated at Facebook -- you can only have 5000 friends. You also can't talk too rapidly to those friends, or the managers will automatically stop you as a spammer, and possibly even ban you. In Second Life, as in a lot of communities, there is a hard limit to the number of groups you can join -- for a long time, it was set at 20; today, it is set at 42 -- that number geeks love as it is the answer to life. So you can only put so many groups that identify your interests on your profile (some groups and stores get around these limits by designing other "group joiners" that amount to mailing lists). I don't know what the Facebook limit for numbers of groups you can join is -- there is likely on.

More to the point, group owners can decide to invite you or not, let you speak or not, mute you or not, etc. -- these are functions long present in Second Life groups, and today we see them on Facebook, G+, Plurk and other forms of social media. I think Twitter has a hard limit on "lists," which is a kind of group.

Coded Reputational Systems and the Technological Confines of the Online Self

There are all kinds of other hard limits put on the collectivized self online -- the extensive system of mute, make invisible, delete, and ban, all heavily made use of by "thought leaders" on social media. I think I haven't even begun to explain the half of it, especially when Google Glass enables some people to take lots of pictures of life and people and do what they want with them, and lots of other people not to be able to "play" as they either won't have $1500 for the goggles, or they won't like the disruption of having a game-world-like HUD up in their face in real life.

(Ironically, generations of especially young buys who played World of Warcraft and other games are perfectly suited to Glass adaption, as they spent hours and hours of their formative years glancing at dashboards and heads-up-display (HUDs) in front of their eyes while concentrating on game action; it is precisely this factor that will encourage more young males to see the world as a place where you can engage in MMORPG -like shooting as well -- who doesn't doubt that among the first apps or games we will see with Glass will be a game to target and shoot people you don't like -- that complaining customers ahead of you in the store line, that slow driver, that annoying clear -- and make them splatter, and get points for it?)

Reputational systems are another thing we have had long and bad experience with in Second Life, and then later on Twitter and Facebook and such -- and I could summarize these as follows:

o any of them can be gamed, and people can find extra-network ways to get lots of "pluses" -- think of Jason Calicanis, the entrepreneur, who offered a free ipad to anyone who could follow him on Twitter in the early days; think of bosses and teachers getting all their employees or students to follow them

o those with old-media star capacity can easily take over new media reputational systems -- Justin Beiber can get 30 million followers on Twitter because he's broadcast all over the world on TV and radio and of course Youtube.

o people may not become your friend for various reasons, and then they aren't in your friend deck, and you can be judged for that

o you yourself may not have spent adequate time nurturing your friend list, which is often achieved by mining others' lists and then putting those friends-of-friends in the awkward position of saying "no," which often makes them cave to "yes"; you can be limited in your numbers of friends.

o pluses for good behaviour as well as neg-rating (if they are even ever put in) can be gamed or flash-mobbed or be happenstance -- even paid for, as we discovered famous game-maker Will Wright himself did to corrupt his own game in the Sims Online by paying people to take "friendship balloons," probably the earliest form of what we all take for granted today as the "friends list". (Of course if there were friendship lists in the Well predate this, but they didn't have the same features, especially the feature of showing "where you had been" and becoming greener or redder depending on interactions).

o inability to get rid of trolling negrates or inflationery plusses meant to discredit -- not appeals system

o proximity issues -- as geolocation gets matched with friends, you are characterized as a "friend" of someone you merely were next to for X minutes, and this gets inflated, misunderstood, can't be changed, etc.

So that informs you of my background for making the claim that the following notions -- merely lightly put up as questions on a professor's web page as "totalitarianism".

But that's just why I worry, as I spent many years working in that sort of field myself and dealing with these institutions and I know how culty and undemocratic they can get.

Leftist Cultural Attitude Toward Corporations

The first problem for the average lefty professor is accepting that corporations have a right to exist. Under current law, like it or not, they also have the right to make political donations and are persons in ways that a certain hard-left cadre does not want them to be (although they don't feel that way about the corporate persons that are unions or nonprofits or law firms -- the traditional bastions of Democratic candidates and their revenue source).

The problem in trying to rein in corporations with all sorts of do-gooding corporate responsibility schemes, like the Ruggie principles (which do not have the force of international law, but are just "soft law" or recommendations) is that the corporation itself -- the profit-making association -- is not first blessed, legalized, and accepted in the UN and other such bodies. With the crippling of the structures for years by the Soviet Union and its allies, that could never happen. The corporation was just a given force outside of these multi-national bodies with no real definition of, and therefore acknowledgement of its right to exist.

To be sure, the right to associate with others is one of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that gets you a certain distance; private property also has some acknowledgement but not sufficient. The right to make a business and run it at a profit is basic to human existence all over the world, even in countries of "really-existing socialism" where at least cronies or shoe-shines are allowed such businesses, but it doesn't really exist as a universal principle in international law.

So in settings like the former Soviet republicans or some Africa countries, where kleptocratic and oligarchic governments suppress small and medium business for the sake of keeping themselves in power, there isn't any body of international law to turn to -- there is only the socialist-informed precepts of various UN bodies long hobbled by the Soviet Union's descendents. One of the cures to the depradations of transnationals might be small, medium and even large businesses of the national sort, but most UN-type schemes fetishize in fact bureaucratically-controlled very small micro-credit schemes, of say, women basket-weavers, over the more challenging businesses that would help countries join the modern world. They fear and loathe them. They don't fit into their ideology.

Lefties, "progressives," socialists of every kind, tend to view capitalism as a system and the corporation as an entity as suspect and needing to be reined in, as always predatory, as alwayd destructive. Understandably, tThey want to devise every kind of aggressive control over it in the belief that they are harmful, and not worry about how free enterprise is nurtured in the first place.

So it's this basic underlying perception of the Eurocrat and the leftist American professor leaning toward Marxist that informs this discussion -- corporations bad, "the people" good.

Responsible Corporations and Free Enterprise

I don't share their worldviews. As a Catholic and human rights advocate, of course I want businesses to be responsible public citizens, to have fair labour practices, not to despoil the environment, not to exploit workers abroad, and so on. Who would not be for these values in our time? But I start from a different place: the belief that capitalism is not immoral and that regulation can ensure its morality in a liberal democratic society. The socialist does not start form that premise: he starts with fear and loathing of the corporation.

I'm not seeing it. In my whole life, my neighbours, relatives, friends and I have worked for big corporations. If not Xerox, than Kodak. If not Home Depot, then Rite-Aid or Wal-mart. Wal-mart is particularly the target of sneering leftists as symptomatic of the "worst" practices. I shrug because I know they are selective, tendentious, and deliberate in this targeting as a project of undermining the capitalist system per se, not genuine as improving this or that company. I see that Wal-mart in fact as responsive to many of the concerns brought to it by this tendentious bunch not really representing its workers. Millions of people work for corporations, large and medium. Corporations give them their livelihoods, their communities' revenue. Those in particularly Soros-funded nonprofits of the left, and leftist university faculties, naturally see the world differently. The world of finance that created the Soros billions that enable them to feed their families (including me for many years I worked at OSI) is opaque to them -- they don't see how it connects to those very corporations they want to bring down (Soros himself is of course something of a perestroika liberal socialist especially in prescriptions for other people).

Well, as you can already see, I don't share the felt need for "automatically" and "efficiently" regulating industry in quite the same way as this professor. I've stood at the Xerox machine and fed it for hours in testing; I've stood at the Rite-Aid counter for hours or laboured in the back room files of Citibank; my friends and relatives have stood for hours in the Home Depot, selling lumber or plants for homes; or at Wal-Mart or Aeropostale selling dresses; they've toiled in the mines at JP Morgan and Kodak and IBM and Dow Chemical as accountants or programmers or engineers or scientists. And by and large they are happy with their lives; they may even be in the 47% if they are part-timers with a school loan or food stamps, but they have nothing like the visceral hatred of corporations that people in universities or the UN can acquire.

So I have BIG questions about HOW and WHAT the regulation is about (and this is often quite deliberately left vague).

Even so, Evgeny Morozov, if he were to apply his critique even-handedly (he doesn't) would have questions about the Internet-centrism and solutionism implicit in all these "automatic" and "efficient" systems. Who gets to decide them, and how?

Promulgate a new theory and vocabulary for open, participatory and “peer progressive” governance;

Define a new curriculum for teaching participatory governance and
problem solving to the next generation of public servants and civic
innovators;

Create methods with which to gauge the effectiveness of open and collaborative governance practices;

Design a research and action agenda to discover and apply new designs for our institutions of governance.

But what was the Alternative Regulation Working Group (getting inside those federal rules!) up to?

How the Advance Guard Can Decide Things for You -- and Shame You on Social Media

As we learn, it's this:

How can we design regulatory processes that are automated and optimized?

How can we involve more voices in the regulatory process and promote distributed decision-making?

How can we create reputation mechanisms best promote self-policing within markets?

How can we apply research on behavioral economics and social pressure to promote better behavior among regulated entities?

How can we create real-time feedback loops that provide information
with which the success of individual regulatory processes can be revised
and improved?

Well, even if you don't share my views about corporations and corporate responsibility that comes parallel first with an acceptance of free enterprise, you might have worries.

Who says we need to automate regulatory proceesses and how is optimized designed?

"Involving more voices" in the regulatory processes sound grand, until you see it in action Beth-Noveck style, which means picking relatively obscure processes with arcane procedures -- like the Patent Office and harnessing networks of likeminded friends to flash-mob them -- from existing opposition lobbides -- in merely a more robust and aggressive form of lobbying electronically.

Distributed Decision-Making Means You Don't Decide, an Algorith Does

"Distributed decision-making" is one of those fashonable academic buzz phrases that can mean different things and also cover up a multitude of sins as those decisions are distributed right away from you.

Distributed decision making (DDM) has become of increasing importance in
quantitative decision analysis. In applications like supply chain
management, service operations, or managerial accounting, DDM has led to
a paradigm shift. The book providesa unified approach to such
seemingly diverse fields as multi-level stochastic programming,
hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, negotiations
or contract theory. Different settings like multi-level one-person
decision problems, multi-person antagonistic planning, and
leadership situations are covered.

How can we create reputation mechanisms best promote self-policing within markets?

As I've explained above, the best reputation system is no reputation system. Automatic, Internet-based reputation systems are always inherently unfair. To be sure, we are stuck with them now with Facebook, as Facebook profiles become a means to hire or fire people. But when you have "self-policing in markets" there's always the question to ask why markets, if they are free, need these "self-police". What about organic law? That governs the issue of labour, pollution of the environment, etc. What else were you going to demand self-policers take on? The corporations of Silicon Valley are never discussed in the leftists' critique of corporations -- it's as if they are invisible. But when they do discuss them -- such as Anil Dash discussed Apple's app store last night on Twitter with me -- they have all kinds of politically-correct demands to make. Apple should sell the intifada app, even if it incites hatred of Israel and glorifies violence, and the drone app, even if it carries the Google logo or seems to be a crude coverage of war they apparently want to discourage -- and not some other app they don't like. Try as I may, I couldn't get Anil to accept the notion of pluralsim

Indeed, the biggest temptation -- and the affordances to make good on it -- that the Internet and mobile gadgets give to "progressives" is to make universalist, unitarian, blanket rules and norms for everything. They think they have the tools and the information to do this now. They can enter into a quest to make one big thing good, rather than tolerate the scrum of thousands of smaller things actly freely and enable market choice. They can believe it is possible to make one thing good (government, a corporation) through automation and "solutionism" -- which is a form of scientism.

In Second Life, it's possible to prevent people from entering your server by putting their name in the list. But there are many other varions on this that led one thoughtful programmer to conclude that any ban system is a weapon.

For one, a system that bounces you back to your "home" set sim, or bumps you hard away, or even makes you crash, i.e. forcibly logs you off, is rightly called a weapon.

But here's what else:

o bans based on the age of the account

o bans based on whether the account has any form of payment on file (this can be hard for Europeans, Latin Americans and many others who find it difficult to get a Mastercard or PayPal account accepted in the North American systems)

o bans based on membership in a group or lack of membership in a group (group-access only)

o IP-based bans (these can give false positives, althought hey work more accurately than admitted, and what they often do is expose alts)

In the world of the Internet-connected Internet of Things, how will these systems which we've experienced so horribly in wired onlined communities like Second Life, or for that matter Facebook or Twitter, actually function in the ideal version of these professors?

What happens when electronic bans can be set up everywhere -- you can't enter -- or at the very least, your smart phone or gadget won't work -- if you don't fit Facebook and other scraped-data criteria, including facial recognition?

The leftists usually contemplate this horror in the hands of corporations (it already is in their hands) and imagines them blocking people from stores, offices, government buildings.

But picture these powers in the hand of those invisible corporations like Google that the "progressives" don't imagine -- look at this appalling concept of "fiberhoods" brought to us in Kansas City creating broadband haves and have-nots in a system that was supposed to increase broadband -- see the subscriber-edition of Harper's by Whitney Terrell and Shannon Jackson, critiquing the much-ballyhooded Google broad-band project:

Utility-owned networks guarantee access to every citizen in a municipality. Google, by contrast, divided up Kansas City into 202 "fiberhoods" -- and decreed that between 5 and 25 percent of the residents in each fiberhood had to preregister for its service by paying a ten-dollar fee and opening a Google account. Fiberhoods that didn't qualify would be left out of the network. Worse, Google's fiberhood map bisected the city at Troost Avenue, a historical racial divide. It soon became clear that most lower-income black areas would fail to meet the preregistration quotas. Local teachers and librarians began canvassing door-to-door with Google employees, urging residents to sign up, and charitable groups raised money for registration fees. A majority of these fiberhoods ultimately qualified for service. But the frenzied volunteer push revealed an uncomfortable truth behind the city's "real partnership" with Google: Kanasas City had left itself poerless to guarantee service for its most vulnerable constituents. And it could not compel Google to redraw its maps in a less discriminatory way. (Of course, the vegan bakery, Pilates studio, and Italian deli next door to Google's subsidized offices received their fiber service for free.)

Or picture this in the hands of Rahm Emmanuel, who vowed to keep chik-Fil-A out of Chicago. What if this was achieved not just by the blocking of an organic paper permit, but made good everywhere with an electronic ban -- no person could come into the city limits if they were an officer or even family member of that corporation; they couldn't buy supplies; they couldn't do business.

The point is, automated processes of regulation devolve down to which ever political group is in power, and they come to power not just through pure democratic "participatory" means, but by coded systems, mediated by coders, with existing power-possessors managing them.

Behavioural Economics

Here's another element that I find a glimpse of that totalitarian future:

How can we apply research on behavioral economics and social pressure to promote better behavior among regulated entities?

We saw this used to win the election for Obama -- he kept his own team of behaviour social scientists on staff to help manipulate the narratives and the demographic drill-downs.

What are "behaviour economics" and "social pressure"? Selective economic boycotts? Who gets to decide them? Deliberation is never the strong point of social media -- even Morozov admits that. (I think he's willing to leave more room for deliberative politics than the automaters in Silicon Valley because he is still feeling safe in the belief that "the smart people surrounded by idiots" will still get to run things).

Recently I read an article which unfortunately I can't find now that described new research in behaviour and norm-setting. If you put up a sign in Yellowstone Park telling people not to take the stones or pick the flowers, they didn't listen. They picked the flowers and took the fossils anyway. Because they saw other people had. But if you put up a sign saying "Millions of visitors did not pick flowers and take stones" or "80% of our visitors did not pick flowers," then they would feel a norm pressuring them and would comply. People comply not with what they are told, but with what they think most people do. This can get very insidious, as you can just hear the fakery coming down the track

Who Runs the Real-Time?

Now this:

How can we create real-time feedback loops that provide information with
which the success of individual regulatory processes can be revised and
improved?

This sounds promising until you ask, again, who decides in the first place about all this, and who actually manages the "real-time feedback loops" -- possibly filtering them their way, just as Tech@State could filter away criticis.

Then you have to ask -- well what do you mean, exactly? What is it you are regulation? And how?

Inside the jpeg of the whiteboard included in this post, you can see:

Fuel efficiency, size, seatbelts, texting.

So these do-gooders want to get into people's cars -- or make them not even drive gas-guzzlers in the first place -- and force them to wear seatbelts and never text.

You could think of a super-automatic way to stop people texting -- include in each new car a text-zapper, or even a mobile dead zone -- but that could work against someone struggling to call for help in a car crash on a deserted winter road, and most people would fight that as too much intrusion.

So the efficiency gag at the "open government" conference suggests "notify receipient of texting while driving - social pressure". How? Have other people who spot him snap pictures and his license place and put it up on Twitter or Facebook? You know, like Adria Rich did at the PyCon about those bad boys who said "dongle"? Is that what you'd like? How about having the driver's boss fire him for extra good measure?

Of course, the free media's coverage of people smashing cars while texting also constitutes a certain social pressure -- news you can use -- but most people think they're the skilled exception. Police arrests of people in jurisdictions that have passed laws against texting while driving also serves as a deterrent. Do we need the "progressives" social pressure, their way, too?

As for size and fuel efficiency, well, who wants to waste gas and pollute the environment? The high price of gas itself does some of this "social pressure," but what are the ways in which the university gang would interfere with the free market to "optimize" their agenda? Pictures on Facebook of fat Wal-Mart shoppers driving big SUVs? And again, could you get them fired from their jobs, for good measure? Or hey, would local laws on emissions and demands to get inspections also work?

Just what needs to be automated here, and who gets to apply that lovely social pressure, and how?

There's lots more to say and analyze here, of course, but I have to move on. Suffice it to say that much of the open government movement isn't really open. It is decided at conferences like these, in "progressive" university classrooms like these, by power-possessors who get their candidates into positions like the FCC or the White House Office of Science and Technology. Most of the public is in the dark -- and the lefties would say it's their own fault.

But Congress never got to decide that gov 2.0 was either necessary or sufficient. They never got to debate it or decide it. Much of gov 2.0 was forcibly introduced as a Trojan Horse from Silicon Valley through the invocation of the magic word "innovation" and "technological upgrades". The entire "wikification" of government (that I submit is part of what led to WikiLeaks) happened without Congress, in spite of Congress. There's never been a hearing that was a critical examination of the premises and practices and products of gov 2.0 -- there has only been a few cheerleading brand-awareness sessions (by the former Sen. Ed Markey, for example).

Eventually, these intrusive gambits of revolutionary collectivism will get more examination, even from liberals, not to mention conservatives. It might be too late to role back some of the engineering the goverati have installed by then.

04/01/2013

The train station in Soligorsk, Belarus, Morozov's home town. Photo by El Bingle.

I'm reading Evgeny Morozov's book To Save Everything, Click Here -- and it's both boring and fascinating because it's like deja-vu all over again -- I've written on exactly the same topics myself for nearly ten years, usually as a dissident surrounded by geeks who relentlessly hated and bullied me.

It's filled with the hypothetical hystericals that he castigates geeks for -- he's adopted this as a literary style worthy of Jeff Jarvis or Seth Godin. For example, he tells us the horror of something called BinCam that can document our garbage and put it up on social media so that -- in theory -- our neighbours or the vigilant state could examine our detritus and tell whether in fact we were recycling sufficiently or perhaps not even eating correctly.

The problem with these stories is that they are anecdotes. Nobody has BinCam. BinCam isn't anywhere installed in such sufficient quantities as to cause anything like the ruckus Morozov imagines. That's because nobody wanted it -- maybe a few "quantified life" geeks experimenting did. Or if it did get installed, it was not with the privacy-busting social-media-shaming factor, but with more of the mundane city planning capacity to tell where the garbage pick-ups could be deployed, to save energy and time and money.

It's filled with name-dropping and citation-dropping that most people won't recognize. Couldn't we ask whether in fact the theory of "flow" comes from Plotinus and not Heraclitus? Oh, and let's not forget my favourite quote from Heraclitus (I think): "Although reason is common to all men, most men behave as if they have their own private understanding".

When you have intimidating stuff like the invocation of Plotinus and Pliny, nobody might dare to say the obvious: but Evgeny, there isn't any software that has a message TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE. It doesn't exist. It's a sort of fable you've made, like your other fables.

Real software -- the ubiquitous Windows of the proprietary and much-hated Microsoft, on which everything is based -- simply says SAVE -- SAVE "as is", so to speak. Or you get the choice: "SAVE AS" -- and you *chose* then. Silicon Valley may not be as world-changing in its aspirations as you wish, at least without giving some agency to users! I can't think of a single application that actually says "TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE". Can you? Is this on a Mac or something? If it doesn't really exist anywhere, isn't that telling? It *might* -- it almost sounds as if it does! But it doesn't! (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

So yeah, I've been writing about the issue of the Silicon Valley hustlers for years and years on this blog and at Second Thoughts. But it's not like I'm vindicated with the appearance of the Sage of Soligorsk on the scene -- because it's like looking at the same landscape through a kaleidoscope, where everything is shifted 25% and skewed.

Each time Morozov is criticizing the same thing I've already criticized, and where he could point out their collectivism and -- dare I say it, technocommunism -- he shifts, and starts calling them some other name. Randians. Schumpeter-trumpeters. Or crypto-followers of some crazy Polish guy. Who in fact is no different in his scientism and socialism than H.G. Wells or Maxim Gorky, or for that matter, at the end of the day, Evgeny Morozov.

Oh, well, I get how it works, instead of working as a low-wage OSI worker for years on end, I should have been born in Eastern Europe and become a Soros fellow!

Still, for the record I'll note that I covered this topic back in 2008 when Morozov was still playing at being a Soros fellow or something, waiting for Lenny Benardo to give him research tips. (It's perhaps telling that Lenny Benardo absolutely refuses to speak about Belarus with me, because I might keep pointedly asking about the Soros mess-ups and question the priorities of grant-giving, whereas Lenny probably never has to talk to Morozov about Belarus, ever, because Morozov doesn't "do" Belarus, his homeland.)

Except to write his book at his parent's dacha there. Oh, the hissing samovar! The buzzing bees! The jam made by babushka from wild raspberries! And the skewering of Silicon Valley between sips of barely-diluted zavarka.

Is Morozov going to mention that McGonigal worked for the Chinese government during their Olympics?

I had to sit through the vilification of being told even by a friend, Raph Koster, that my non-gamer culture and the culture of gamers (ostensibly superior) was the source of my problem with gamification -- and shunned because I dared to say that the deified Richard Bartle had social engineering-socialism in his games. I had to sit through legions of fanboyz villifying me because I dared to question the wackiness of McGonigal. Read it, it's truly extraordinary, in light especially of how much safer it has become now to criticize Jane.

With SL, Rosedale took the idea of reduced "coordination costs" to come up with this idyllic notion -- never put in practice:

By putting up a page where thousands of people can cast a fixed number of votes to prioritize (or modify) a fairly specific work list of features and changes for upcoming versions of Second Life, we are further blurring the boundaries between the ‘company’ of Linden Lab and the residents of Second Life. We are asking for help (and I suspect comitting ourselves substantially to what we hear) in what is generally a very private and hallowed process – the setting of development priorities.

Ultimately, Philip and his successors shut down the voting tool because people either asked for priorities the company, mindful of their competitors in the gaming industry, didn't think should be coded; or they didn't like some of the things asked for because they went against their geek religion; or they would prohibit the compay from being sold to marketers (i.e. IP masking). And this is how the whole Internet will go, as Second Life has often been used as a prototyper, deliberately or simply using its virtuality as an affordance for petri-dish work.

Back then, I asked whether a theory from efficient firms from 1937 was exactly the time period to be mining for ideas...In fact, the Taylorism that migrated into Stakhanovitism and later the Kaizen method in Japan was what we had to worry about -- was collectivizing everyone with open source software merely a way to reduce transaction costs for firms and ensure oligarchy for them, communism for the rest of us? You know, "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us." So I had critiques like this one about the Leninism of the Linden Tao.

Now Morozov has produced a 16,000 word piece for The Baffler -- you wondered who they were going to get to write on tech after their co-editor Aaron Swartz killed himself. It's too long for a magazine piece and too short for a book, so it's a pamphlet of the sort socialists and the Catholic Church still specialize in -- where the author is erudite, wordy, didactic, and exasperated with the unbeliever.

Here's the nutshell of my critique of O'Reilly and his invasion of the State Department and government in general with his "gov 2.0" and even "civ soc 2.0":

Civil society is something I do know about, having studied it and lived it for 30 years. And open source and web 2.0 is something I know about, having studied it and lived it for the last 6 years. And I see something very destructive and corrosive that could occur by the arrogant imposition of the open source mystique and "business model" on to the more fragile and complex organic human systems of civil society that aren't mechanical like machines and the Internet.

It means monetarizing things for a few consultants -- like one man and his team that maybe shouldn't be monetarized (and don't pretend that the non-profit work of the O'Reilly empire is somehow unrelated to the expensive workbooks and conferences and the high human cost of open source in general).

It means low or no wages as a way of life and aspiration and necessity to keep work tools free for people that have high sources of compensation elsewhere.

But worse than all that, making everything into a stack and an ap means less freedom and less participation in decision-making, not more, *because the very decision about mechanization in the first place was ripped out of people's hands before they could think about it*.

Indeed, despite his enormous study of the subject, Morozov hasn't really touched on the corrosive effect of the "Code for America" stuff invading cities all over the place, a debate I took on in 2010 here.

And Morozov barely discusses the pernicious evangelist role of Alex Howard, who insists, against all common sense and logic and reason, that he is a journalist, and not a propagandist or public relations agent -- as I did here, after a lot of discussion on Whimsley, where Tom Slee confronted Howard on the entire "gov 2.0" racket which is exploited by conservative governments (and leftist governments, too, I might add, as Obama has abused it) to hand out consulting contracts to cronies and pretend to innovate and avoid hard topics.

(Of course, I haven't read the book all the way to the end yet, so maybe that's to come).

I'll come back to do a more thorough book review when I can, in which I explain that funny twist that happens with every single critique -- where Morozov misses the moment to recognize something as in fact "Soviet," shall we say, or collectivist, or socialist -- and then declares it something else. For example, you have to wonder -- how did he get through his critique of Clay Shirky, whom he skewers, without ever mentioning his seminal "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" -- which might really be re-titled, as I've written repeatedly for years, "The Group Members Are Our Own Worst Enemy". And to miss Shirky's one big forray into foreign policy on the webzine of the same name, from his areas of expertise in Internet culture, where essentially, he tells people to forego their Twitter revolutions until the advance guard tells them it's okay, because they've become sufficiently mature for democracy -- an ideology Nazarbayev would be proud of, and in fact invokes (and maybe that's how he was able to win over Jimmy Wales).

For now, let's just look at the things hidden in the 16,000 word piece about O'Reilly.

Morozov decides O'Reilly is a Randian, because he's for entrepreneurs forging their businesses in the face of conservative big, ostensibly backward, proprietary-software companies. I guess Morozov never studied the role of the peredovik in Soviet culture and the winners of socialist competitions.

Ayn Rand, of course, is as Bolshevist as the Bolsheviks she countered, and she got that way having to counter them fiercely, but she's a product of her time and copies their revolutionary methods. The rigidity of her ideology; her hatred of religion; her relentless ideological struggle with other sectarians or the slightly-politically-incorrect within her own circles -- these are all products of the Bolshevik age we still live with. If someone worked harder in the collective farm of open software and also figured out how to make money with the $39.95 manuals to actually work this "free" stuff and also charged big speaking fees, they merit a spot in the Soviet Union of Constructors, not a blast as a Randian or hypothetically an exaggerated capitalist.

O'Reilly's earlier nods to Microsoft or to a hypothetical "choice" between open and proprietary software, even defending it as an intellectual freedom, was only tactical and only present 10 years ago. Today, Code for America culture adherents deride as "vendorocracy" any proprietary software that a municipality runs, and as we see from Cyrus Farivar's uneven critical examination of Code for America on Ars Technica, somebody making a zippy little startup with open source software and getting the city contract ahead of others is the "good guy" whereas those other contenders are evil (or companies that *should* be contending if you still kept a free-market competition system and competitive bids at city hall instead of ecstatic free software cronyism).

O'Reilly peddled that line only tactically for a time, like the pro-abortion crusaders used "choice" for a time until they could change their causes' title to "women's health" and beat any critic as wishing the illness of women and waging a war on women. So O'Reillyites at State today would describe as backward and fearful of technology and consumed with FUD anybody who suggests that an older vendor with proprietary software not as caught up in the giddyness of 2.0 might be better for security or privacy.

But here's the thing about Evgeny -- he loves open source software. He himself is not for the intellectual proposition of choice between types of software, even tactically until the Better Day comes. In this Baffler essay that many will read and write about as "a critique of the open source software culture" that is invading everything (and thinking it can even use the sectarian principles of agile software production on governance of people in general), in fact, Morozov roots most vigorously for just that -- in a more pure form unalloyed with any capitalism

Morozov is more of a Stallmanite that Stallman. He pretends to admit that Stallman is obviated by being preoccupied with licensing schemes at a time when "the cloud" has obviated them.

Of course, "the cloud" has done no such thing, as proprietary cloud software can exist; private firms deploy their cloud magic even with open source in ways they don't publish; and big companies still fiercely fight over what the standards of cloudness will be. At the end of the day, the cloud is just other people's computers, not your own. There should be a new study of server farms and server farm politics underneath the cloud, that Morozov hasn't gotten to yet.

Stallman isn't about license schemes, really -- he's more of a cultural coder than O'Reilly precisely because he hasn't converted his empire, still very active (with the friends of Bradley Manning, for example) into a cash cow in the same way and therefore has more street cred. The Stallmanite ideals -- that everything has to be free, that bugs are shallow to the thousands of eyes let in to see that software, in fact is something Morozov exhuberantly proclaims, with this telling paragraph:

Underpinning Stallman’s project was a profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity. Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading or biometric identification presented no major mysteries

Now that's just sectarian clap-trap of the sort we thought Morozov was supposed to be critiquing, not embracing. See what I mean? There's a strange technno-determinism of the sort Morozov is supposed to be denouncing if he believes that "if only" we could see the magic code that enables traders to use the speed and amplification properties of the Internet to move markets perilously (to their own profit and sometimes to the detriment of countries), why, we could somehow cure the faults of capitalism. But the Internet is merely (sometimes) a capitalist tool, and the real problem for Morozov which he most decidedly disdains is capitalism and free enterprise and free markets themselves. Sure, capitalism should be regulated even in a free society with free enterprise -- and it is, and the debate about "how much" is what politics is about. Here, I suspect Morozov thinks that "transparency" on the kind of software some capitalists have made good use of will somehow enable a naming and shaming (or industrial sabotage?) effort or an "equalling of the playing field"...or some other socialist fantasy.

But in a free world, you have to ask why traders can't have proprietary software that gives them an edge in trading fast, and if your real problem is capitalism itself, this particular facet of it really isn't the issue; and if your real problem is that you just want to regulate some of the fiercest aspects of capitalism that can be destructive, you've never explained why you couldn't do this with organic law instead of transparency of the code to those putative million eyes.

As for biometrics, something that states from South Korea to Turkmenistan are using now -- while gas-rich Turkmenistan may not be able to supply clean water and jobs and even gas to all of its people, especially in remote areas, it has seen fit to rush to apply the latest scientific methods to create a biometric passport of the future -- and control its citizenry.

Knowing the software code that probably the Chinese wrote for the Turkmens or knowing the code of what might be implemented in the US won't change anything -- what's at stake here is the will of the government, its undemocratic nature, and its resorting to organic methods of control as well as electronic.

Morozov's critique of Silicon Valley-orchestrated collectivism -- yes, he does come up with an actual critique of collectivism now in rather a cunning way -- is that it is soulless. It's not "true" collectivism. That's because all it is, really, is a zillion individual actions -- clicks on likes, or retweeting of messages or copying of memes or whatever the individual act is -- without any sense of camraderie or joint purpose.Says Morozov:

This is a very limited vision of participation. It amounts to no more than a simple feedback session with whoever is running the system. You are not participating in the design of that system, nor are you asked to comment on its future. There is nothing “collective” about such distributed intelligence; it’s just a bunch of individual users acting on their own and never experiencing any sense of solidarity or group belonging. Such “participation” has no political dimension; no power changes hands.

If you hold up a mirror to this paragraph to see what, then, Morozov might find ideal, not only might he himself disappear, but you see the yearning for collectivism nevertheless straining through as an ideal: It would be great if we did have collectives, just better, more meaningful collectives! It would be great if they actually democratically participated! It would be cause if they had a sense of solidarity and group belonging! It would be even better if they had a "political dimension" and actually took power! Hey, let's Occupy Wall Street with that!

I'm not talking about libertarian survivalism here and the lone individual on the range -- I'm just criticizing bureaucratic socialism. Really, how does Morozov's "better" group with solidarity differ from, oh, the Leninist notion of "democratic centralism" (the Politburo can debate, but nobody else) or Central Asian notion of the kuraltai (very free group debates with even the powerless included until the power-possessors decide after sifting out what they see as "the voice of the people" and then ruthlessly silencing all further debate) -- or Chinese "self-criticism" circles?

Morozov is still celebrating the group and its dynamics; he doesn't have a vision of the protection of individual rights or the protection of minorities, or how to change the group afterward, when it becomes "its own worst enemy", i.e. strays from the rigid ideal that may have been once "collectively" decided. What is the theory of change that really constitutes democracy, not just a glorification of "participation" that leads us to "participatory democracy" where the cadres end up deciding everything? Because not everybody participates. Because not everybody can or should have a stake. Why should a bunch of jobless students get to overthrow the stock market?

So I'd make a sharper critique of this Silicon Valley "collective intelligence" stuff than Morozov by pointing out --again -- the pernicious thinking of Clay Shirky in "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" which is really about how straying group members who revolt against non-democratically decided goals should be controlled -- or Beth Noveck, who thinks you can't have "here comes everybody" (which Shirky himself disavowed later) because you get people who aren't appropriate or are off-topic or are too stupid -- which is why a network of self-selecting experts under her guidance and filtration is the best kind of collective. You know, "the cadres decide everything," as Stalin put it so well. And he should know; despite being called "rude" by Lenin, he was eventually able to take over everything just by performing the simple task of keeping the minutes for meetings (and shaping them subtly) -- sort of writing the code for the group, if you will...

Of course, there's plenty of sense of joint purpose to go around among the Internet socialists on their campaigns, but I've generally found that the groups like Moveon or Daily Kos or Organizing for America are cadre-run, with the masses seldom having any real choice but to enthusiastically "like" and retweet what is peddled to them by a few cunning intellectuals at the top of the pyramid.

Morozov should be troubled by the bureaucratic socialism of Moveon or Center for American Progress, too, but never is.

And for him, the ideal of the collective still shines goldenly on the yawning heights:

As a result, once-lively debates about the content and meaning of specific reforms and institutions are replaced by governments calling on their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or use their phones to report potholes. If Participation 1.0 was about the use of public reason to push for political reforms, with groups of concerned citizens coalescing around some vague notion of the shared public good, Participation 2.0 is about atomized individuals finding or contributing the right data to solve some problem without creating any disturbances in the system itself. (These citizens do come together at “hackathons”—to help Silicon Valley liberate government data at no cost—only to return to their bedrooms shortly thereafter.) Following the open source model, citizens are invited to find bugs in the system, not to ask whether the system’s goals are right to begin with. That politics can aspire to something more ambitious than bug-management is not an insight that occurs after politics has been reimagined through the prism of open source software.

Again holding up the mirror and thinking about the shining heights, you see the recipe for the real Better World:

o challenge the entire system of capitalism -- it's time, comrades!

o have the code contributions disturb the system -- how about apps to name and shame every contributor to the mayor's campaign and dox them?

o take on issues much bigger than potholes -- why not march and demonstrate right in front of Jamie Dimon's house?

o don't go home to your bedrooms after your hackathon, camp in a tent on the square

And so on. In other words, Morozov is merely annoyed that O'Reilly, like the 1970s head shop owners, capitalizing on the zeitgeist of the SDS 1960s, began to profit from the sale of bong pipes and posters and black lights, is derailing the Revolution by selling open source software as something grafted on to capitalism -- at least, capitalism for some people in Sillicon Valley.

He castigates O'Reilly for seeming to "hate" protests -- by which he means, again, O'Reilly's actual cooptation of the antagonistic group dyanmics so often available online into "patch or GTFO" coder culture operations. He then picks anodyne things to work on -- a park -- rather than anything that might substantively challenge either politics as usual (which Morozov seems to believe is "bought out by corporate interests) or the socialist theories of the 1960s and 1970s (Ilyich) that rule the unions and the schools and are profoundly challenged by schemes like school vouchers.

Interestingly, O'Reilly mentions the Moldova Twitter protests in that piece positively -- up to a point:

The internet provides new vehicles for collective action. A lot of people pay attention when social media is used to organize a protest (as with the recent twitter-fueled protests in Moldova.) But we need to remember that we can organize to do work, as well as to protest!

He might as well be Lukashenka (never challenged by Morozov) telling the intellectuals to stop babbling in the cafes in the city and help bring in the potato harvest. Time to stop complaining and work, comrades! Patch or GTFO! In fact, the Twitter protests didn't lead to solutions of protracted problems caused by the Russians, like Transdniester.

Morozov's critique of O'Reilly, if he weren't burdened by his own idealistic vision of collectivism, could involve calling out the cadres who decide everything in gov 2.0, whether the Sunlight Foundation or the latest Google staff or collectivist academics installed in various White House agencies. That's what I do. Morozov doesn't, because his target is conservative Western governments that get in the way of old-time socialism, and to some extent, the Kremlin's agenda -- like the Cameron government in Londongrad. Hence gripey paragraphs like this:

At the same time that he celebrated the ability of “armchair auditors” to pore through government databases, he also criticized freedom of information laws, alleging that FOI requests are “furring up the arteries of government” and even threatening to start charging for them. Francis Maude, the Tory politician who Cameron put in charge of liberating government data, is on the record stating that open government is “what modern deregulation looks like” and that he’d “like to make FOI redundant.” In 2011, Cameron’s government released a white paper on “Open Public Services” that uses the word “open” in a peculiar way: it argues that, save for national security and the judiciary, all public services must become open to competition from the market.

Market competition might be a good thing -- say, in competing for software contracts. I've often wondered if that enormously expensive boondoggle on the time-clock software for the City of New York was open or proprietary software, and what that story was really all about -- even if it turns out that the software is proprietary, the notion of the endless chain of experts required to keep it working because people can't be empowered to run it themselves normally seems to be at the heart of the problem. And the problem with New York City is in fact that it has outsourced to nonprofits and religious groups too much of the work of managing difficult populations that it needs to keep under one roof and monitored and kept transparent to the public far, far more than it does.

If you can get through the 16,000 words, you will be left with this: unadulterated worship of Stallman -- indeed, a fresh appreciation of Stallmanism with all the zeal of a new convert:

Once the corporate world began expressing interest in free software, many nonpolitical geeks sensed a lucrative business opportunity. As technology entrepreneur Michael Tiemann put it in 1999, while Stallman’s manifesto “read like a socialist polemic . . . I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise.” Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types. Stallman didn’t care about offending the suits, as his goal was to convince ordinary users to choose free software on ethical grounds, not to sell it to business types as a cheaper or more efficient alternative to proprietary software. After all, he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association.

But...go back to that socialism part. That was what was wrong with it in the first place.

03/05/2013

Alec Ross, State Department's
"innovation" guy and Tweeter-in-chief, speaking at the "The Project
[R]evolution Digital and Social Media Conference" (*gag*) in New
Zealand. Photo by US Embassy in NZ, 2012.

And he's taking his 300,000+ followers with him. After all, his Twitter account formed more than two years ago is just in his own name, it's not the name of a generic office.

And that's wrong. I think that private persons shouldn't be able to privatize social capital that they gained while performing a government job. For that matter, the same applies whether they were in a corporate or nonprofit job. In fact, that's a good reason for institutions to stop letting these big stars who drag all the attention to themselves make and maintain these private reputation-builders that they can't then control.

Sure, those same followers can dump him and then go follow the new guy. But he's got them now to blast out huge messages of lobbying industrial strength to enhance his new position -- at Google, or a Mitch Kapor nonprofit, or some other third-world-go-gooding collectivist operation like the NGO that languished after he went to take up his government job.

The State Department should make an account called @StateInnovator or whatever (@innovator is taken by some goof who wants Ross' job) and then have the picture of the person in that office for now on it, but not enable that person to make an entire fiefdom with his followers that he can then take away.

I first noticed this phenomenon of tribal leaders attracting all the attention to themselves with one-way broadcast accounts and numerous followers when I first came on Twitter five years ago (I joined in 2007 on my account Prokofy and 2008 on my accout catfitz). Some people would gain enormous amounts of followers -- the early adapters like Scoble did it with automatic scripts, in part scripts that automatically followed back other people or automatically said thank you or started conversations.

Twitter banned some of these resource-eating automatic scripts later, but the advantage was clear -- as it still is. When you join Twitter today, just as in the past, it forces on you a list of recommended people that you must chose among to make your "friends" before you can move on to using Twitter -- it's quite coercive and you can't seem to escape out of it. In fact, it forces on you the number of five friends before it lets you out of its clutches. The friends to pick from include Lady Gaga but also a lot of those tech friends of the Twitter devs -- Alec Ross is on there if I'm not mistaken and so is Human Rights Watch and Anne Marie Slaughter and other "progressives" who get a significant boost by having every new member of Twitter (I don't know if it is localized) have to pick from these enforced "friends". The only Republican leader on there is Mario Rubio although there is the now out-of-date Mitt Romney account.

A position at the State Department is not a place for you merely to build your personal resume and gain connections to use in corporate lobbying jobs later. You're supposed to build the institution while serving the public, you know. Serve the public?

Another thing that the rules should stipulate is that people making or operating social media accounts on behalf of the US government should not block critical members of the public on those services. If the services themselves have not found reason to block them for spam, incitement of hatred, or harassment with excessive @ posting etc. then those government officials should not block them merely because they are egomaniacs with thin skins.

Alec Ross muted and blocked me -- meaning he entirely disappeared from the view! -- on Facebook, where he maintains not a personal account to share pictures of his kids and cats, but continues his public, government influence-making.

That is too much power for government officials to have.

He had no business doing that. Any judge in the land would throw it out as a violation of the First Amendment by the state, not only censoring speech but blocking even the view of government speech from the public that is otherwise open to all.

It's no good hiding behind the fact that Facebook is a private company and it can do what it wants -- public officials can't do what they want and have to uphold the Constitution. It's not upholding the Constitution to hold town halls and block people who merely ask questions -- and it's not about swearing, or heckling or disrupting, that in a real-life town hall might bring the security guards or cops. It's about pasting a one-line disagreement on to the high-view page of an ego-infused influencer and arrogant "thought-leader" who is entirely full of himself and unable to take even the slightest mar of his propaganda campaign.

If officials went around behaving like this with the real press in real life, or went around behaving like this in town halls in real life, they'd be criticized severely. Oh, they've started doing that. Look at the ruckus over Woodward and pressure from the White House.

Officials gone wild on social media -- our Russian ambassador Michael McFaul comes to mind -- should be tethered more to their public service functions. And they are getting tethered, as Alec Ross found himself reined in, when State finally decided to do Twitter clearance and make people submit tweets before they blasted them to their huge audiences of 300,000 plus their massive network effect of re-tweeting.

When you see this, you can't help wondering if these accounts will finally be removed all together:

Michael McFaul @McFaul

23:35 in Moscow RT @robbirgfeld Ambassador @McFaul spends a couple of hours a night responding and reading social media. #smwdiplomacy

Ross' feed has always tended toward the anodyne, to the point that you wondered if it was some kind of Aesopian message:

@AlecJRoss

1,476 years ago today, the Ostrogoths began the first siege of Rome. It lasted for a little over a year.

@AlecJRoss

This has long been a key to America's success. We must attract brilliant innovators like Tesla & allow them to make America their home (2/2)

@AlecJRoss

212 year ago today, America's 1st Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, was inaugurated as President of the United States.

Er, what made him think of barbarians at the gates?

And...sucking up to his new boss, implying that he, too, could become president?

Funny that Kerry comes in, and this guy goes out. Why? Just a new broom sweeps clean?

Alec follows slavishly the "progressive" line and the Google line for all the issues. And I suspect Kerry will be no different, but I just don't know yet.

Ross has always dutifully retweeted the line du jour, which is exemplified by a recent one about how "we must all oppose cell phone jailbreaking" and retweet of this link -- and yes, retweets ALWAYS mean endorsement with this gang. The president answered this tekkie flashmob and Ross revelled in it.

Google pushes this line effectively through all its networks and lobbying active measures and agents of influence. Why? Because it wants to erode the power of telecoms, and have people be able to directly use Google and the Internet in general more for communicating.

Hackers and copyleftists who make up the some 7 million people who jailbreak their phones are lobbying to have this wrongful act legalized.

Why is it a wrongful act? Well, because it is a violation of the user's agreement. Why do these mean telecoms want to "lock you in" to their services? Well, because they gave you a ridiculously low-priced loss-leader -- your smart phone itself. Those things are expensive to make. They should cost more than they do. But no one would buy them if they did. So they drop the price of the phone, then tuck that cost into a binding two-year agreement to use a phone service like Verizon or AT&T. You pay ahead something on this contract, then have to keep paying, and if you default, you are billed with a heavy fine that the companies zealously collect.

Well, aren't these telecoms just being greedy? Well, no, they have real costs -- the kind of costs Susan Crawford never calculates in her jihad against them applauded by Google -- capital costs.

When you jailbreak the phone and start using Internet VOIP or various other things like Skype only for calls or free wifi, then you defeat the plan that subsidizes your phone.

This criminality doesn't trouble Alec Ross, Mashable, or the White House, as it responded to a massive engineered outpouring with smug approval. I can only hope the courts will push back. Because it isn't fair or just to the telecoms. How will they get the cost of the phone and its use covered in a world where hackers rampantly engage in theft of services and "liberate" the device?

When I get a cable TV box, I don't "jailbreak" it to get more channels I don't pay for; I don't "liberate" my Verizon modem box to get more broadband or even some other service. Why should I get to do this to my phone?

Apple wants to go on disguising the cost of these phones -- they can be $400 and that doesn't reflect either its real cost or the cost it should be if it had better labour conditions -- to sell more of them and get people hooked then on the apps and other products. They don't like jailbreaking, but I don't know that they are going to lobby that hard against it.

It's wrong of the president to take a position on what amounts to a *business dispute about costs and how to cover them* and weigh in on the side of some businesses and not others. Doing that is not proper to free enterprise and a liberal and democratic state. It's the sort of thing that begins to happen in socialist states with cronyism and state capitalism or oligarchy.

Alec Ross is delighted to be part of that. His entire career as "innovator" exemplifies my constant refrain about the Wired State, that a group of radicals and corporate copyleftists have harnessed their social media inventions to take power and ram through their agenda.

While Ross ignored my question on Twitter, where he doesn't block me for some reason, he confirmed in answer to another person's question on Facebook (which I got a friend to check as he has me blocked) that the position at State is going to remain open.

Who will take over this position?

Probably someone who will travel less -- after all, if the Sequester has to stop Co-dels (Congressional delegations) from going to some of their favourite haunts like Vienna or Paris, then it makes sense that the Innovator guy should stop going to Australia and places like that to boost the copyleftist cause.

03/01/2013

Yes, soon, I may be able to retire from blogging about the Wired State, which I'm not particularly good at, because there are better bloggers with more resources and more attention on this subject now, for example at Red State.

I didn't use to read Red State much at all, but after the elections, when they repudiated the crazies in the GOP like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman, etc. there was hope. After all, I had just voted Republican for the first time in my life as a protest. I don't think I could become a Republican party member, but I'd like the party to get better than it is.

I only care for about half of what I read on Red State -- so much of it leaves me cold because it's either about gun stuff, which I don't support, or it's about that day-to-day political scrum of domestic issues on the Hill about who said what or who fought with whom or wasn't righteous enough -- and I can't get hugely interested in that.

But I like Tech at Night (I wish the guy would just write and stop clearing his throat all the time and apologizing) and there have been some great pieces on the whole Google problem and politics which have been very well done.

Obama, Google and the Democratic Party

Today, there is a great expose on Google and the intimate connections with the Democratic Party.

Neil Stevens has a great piece, Whose Side is Google On? which really gives the lie to the constant refrain from techies that there are a mixture of political views in these big companies. Of course there aren't. Geez, look at the campaign chart above! Says Stevens:

A few years ago, Google was deeply in bed with the left wing activists like Moveon.org and
Free Press pushing for Internet regulation. When Obama was elected,
Google got even more deeply embedded with both the left and the
government. At this point, Republicans began paying more attention to
Google and Google realized it had a political problem.

So, after years of lining up with the left to demand more government regulation of the internet, Google changed course. (“Google cozies up to the GOP“)
Google promoted their Republican lobbyists, hired Republican
consultants, sucked up to conservative organizations and even hired a
squishy Republican, Susan Molinari (R-MSNBC) to run their DC office.

Stevens asks whether Google will jump back into the arms of Moveon.org and CAP etc. on "net neutrality". Oh, of course they will. They never left. They feel they can move in for the kill now with Obama II.

Remember that enormous, sophisticated data operation the Obama
campaign had? The one that gave them massive daily data on public
opinion trends in almost every segment of potential voters.

It’s almost as if Democrats had access to some sort of huge database
of real time information about what the public was reading or writing
online. The kind of breathtakingly large, real-time data that could be
used for real-time trend analysis, predictive modeling and even
behavioral manipulation.

Well, I've been trying to find the smoking guns on that, and of course, in this discussion here over Katherine Maher's article on Westphalia, they all vigorously deny it.

My hunch is actually that Eric Schmidt is not going to stay with Google. I don't know why I feel that. I just do. Maybe because he sold his stock, and because his title is demoted, and because his trip to North Korea to snuggle with the Dictator and bond over connectivity cults wasn't so well-received and even got sort of upstaged by his own daughter's blogging.

But Google may be calving off other nonprofits to permeate society better and maybe they'll have him run one.

Google Running Intel for Dems?

Ben Howe says:

The real threat is that Google, or perhaps just a few people within
the leadership of Google, may be quietly operating as a private
intelligence agency for the left.

And every time you use Google or Gmail you could be contributing just a little bit more of your behavioral data to the left.

Well, they probably are doing that. But he has no proof. You can be sure that Google would work very hard to keep traces of anything like that out of the public eye. If you notice, the top Googlers really are very well hidden, and aren't even in Google -- McLaughlin doesn't have a Wikipedia entry -- neither to others in the top echelons, current and former. Do they have a deal with Jimmy Wales? Or are they just good at working their own non-secret-for-them algorithms?

Obama’s impressive data team also boasts a large number of high-profile connections to Google, starting at the top with Rayid Ghani, OFA Chief Scientist. Not only has Ghani keynoted an address at Google Research Labs, according to his online CV
(PDF), but he also spoke this month at his grad school alma mater
Carnegie Mellon University in a lecture series sponsored by – you
guessed it – Google. Ghani’s former department at Carnegie Mellon boasts seven alumni on Google’s payroll on their website.

Ghani’s role on the Obama campaign was to direct Project Dreamcatcher, which used “text analytics to gauge voter sentiment” about issues and speeches. I wonder how he came up with that idea? Could it have been in talking with Katharina Probst, Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Google, who, according to her own site, is “working on new features for Gmail and Gmail Ads?” (Google is currently facing some heat over how it exploits Gmail user data for advertisers – but they would never exploit user data to help the Obama campaign, right?)

They Have All Come Out from Under the Berkman Center's Overcoat

Ben Howe also notes Catherine Bracy, OFA Community Outreach Lead, Product Manager,
Tech4Obama Program Manager, and co-director of Obama’s San Francisco
technology field office and formerly of the Berkman Center "an administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which receives millions in funding from Google," says Howe. Well, no surprise there; I have spent a lot of time over the years arguing with people from the Berkman Center like Ethan Zuckerman, an avid GrumpyCatFitz follower, and Jillian York, who is no longer there but is now at EFF.

I was trying to undertand what all the neuralgia was from York over my probing on her position about "net neutrality". I put all the tweet fights here on Storify. She claimed she wasn't flogging it at the OSCE Internet 2013 meeting because it's a domestic issue and that's "not her job". I pointed out that it was a position of EFF's, where she worked, and she could hardly separate from it. She claimed it was a division of labour between foreign and domestic affairs and that EFF didn't really lobby on "net neutrality". Oh, come now. I pointed out the blog illustrating that a former intern at EFF had gone on to become the Free Press advocacy director on "net neutrality," surprise, surprise. She made it seem like this was some terrible exaggeration and mocked it by saying OMG, we cited someone's blog! Well, it's not just someone's blog, it's your former guy, now in this other group that does your agenda. She thinks that the microscopic differences between all these Mitch Kapor groups, despite the overlapping of boards and funders, are somehow significant. They aren't.

One of the things I really, really complained about all last year was the way these copyleftists were taking the "net neutrality" gambit and trying to insert it into international fora and put it on par with the problem of countries like Russia filtering the Internet or countries like Tajistan simply blocking all of Facebook or trying to -- not to mention the arrests of bloggers such as in Azerbaijan.

There was no question that Rebecca MacKinnon, on the US dime, speaking as the keynote speaker at the OSCE Dublin conference, pushed for "net neutrality" as did the UN rapporteur Frank Le Rue, somewhat indirectly, and some European states. The US activists also got various Serbs and Azeris and others to speak up from their NGOs about the issue -- and of course there is a very active Dutch group called Free Press (which claims it is not related to the US Free Press group) which is pushing it -- I got into a debate with their staffer and really challenged them doing this -- "net neutrality" in the hands of oppressive governments in fact means further granting of control of the Internet for filtration and censorship -- it's the old New Information Order gambit of yesteryear at UNICEF, or the World Information Society summits in which journalists and ISPs are pressed into service to fulfill "progressive agendas" that are "helping mankind," and then of course kill off competition, markets, freedom.

The fight is more dramatic in Europe where they have a history of distrust toward private media, more state broadcasting for TV, and a natural inclination to have the state then run the Internet, too, in the name of "freedom from capitalism" which they view as a negative -- much the way Lessig calls markets a "restraint" -- or worse.

Fake Claim that Comcast 'Censored' OWS

Free Press' rep at OSCE Internet 2013 Tim Carr openly called for "net neutrality" and gave a talk claiming falsely that Comcast censored OWS and Amazon censored WikiLeaks -- wildly tendentious stuff that no one was available to push back on from the panel, which left me just being able to question some of it from the floor, which was limited. Free Press is of course a Marxist front group (McChesney).

I'm reading an old Rand study now, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics by Philip Selznick. I swear every word reads like the "community organization" background of Obama, and the vehicle that Obama for America is now morphing into. It's refreshing to read a book where there is no apology for frank discussion of how communists infiltrate organizations because they were really doing that and it was really visible just after the war.

We shall speak of organizations and organizational practices as weapons when they are used by a power-seeking elite in a manner unrestrained by the constitutional order of the arena within which the contest takes place. Thus the partisan practices used in an election campaign -- insofar as they adhere to the written and unwritten rules of the contest -- are not weapons in this sense. On the other hand, when members who join an organization in apparent good faith arei n fact the agends of an outside elite, the routine affliation becomes "infiltration".

As this book was published in 1952, there's no Internet -- but that means there's no distraction to studying how organizations work, how people are indoctrinated into them, how recruitment and ideological zeal is cultivated and of course loyalty.

With the whole Google and Wired State sort of thing, it's not like they have to have a YPSL-style summer camp to indoctrinate cadres. There's no need for boot camp when you have bar camp. Through all the various conferences and unconferences, bar camps and TED talks and Sun Valley and Roots Camp and Wikimania and even Tech @State, people find each other and bind and develop that formulation of "the line" that is so important to cadre organizations.

What does "cadre organization" mean to me? It doesn't have to mean some literal communist cell or even special indoctrination; it means people who work with a very aggressive line that does not brook dissent, and who react to outside criticism by either trying to vilify the critics as in the wrong political opponents' group, or demean them as "trolls," or say that they are so complex and technical that the average person just can't understand them. You see all of that cadre work on this thread related to the Westphalia article I discussed.

RightsCon

I think one of the ways the ideological line was crafted and advanced was through RightsCon (aptly named, as it is a con using rights as a cover). This will be back again this fall. Here the Silicon Valley regulars leading the charge like EFF (John Perry Barlow) took advantage of the fact that the Ebay VP's wife, Elaine Donahoe, as an Obama bundler, was named as US ambasador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. She still holds that post. And that office has been used to advance Internet Freedom, in part understood in the classic way, but also as a toehold to give MacKinnon a platform and slip in the "net neutrality" stuff and anti-SOPA and anti-CISPA work.

At this Rightscon, Silicon Valley was able to bring in all the top human rights officials, like the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Michael Posner (whom I've known and worked closely with for some 30 years) and all the leading human rights groups, and lobby them to their heart's content with no outside critics, trying to convert them to their vision of "Internet freedom". They didn't succeed in totalling throwing these people to adopt "net neutrality" -- but they didn't have to, as the purpose was to soften them up to the approach of moral equivalence between control of the Internet by China and Russia and "control of the Internet" through something like SOPA. The result was collaboration, many more meetings to come, and of course, the deploying of budgets.

I don't know who will fill Posner's post now that he is leaving. He and several other key human rights leaders like Harold Koh, the legal advisor, and Samantha Power, the democracy staff person at the National Security Council, are leaving. Maybe they don't feel they can justify drones. Or Bradley Manning's pre-trial detention. Or any number of things. I will be very, very interested to see who gets in that spot at DRL, whether it will be one of these very copyleftist-primed cadres or whether it will a a veteran style civil rights leader like Gay McDougall. In a way, it doesn't matter, as this office already has Dan Baer in charge of the Internet Freedom portfolio, and he may be friendly to all the copyleftist types, but he is under adult supervision at State that means he cannot go too far with this (I hope).

There's no question that these folks are battered mercilessly by the left and those far more radical than they are or can be.

US Delegation at OSCE Gets it Right

There's nothing objectional of the "net neutrality" or "anti-SOPA" stuff in this speech delivered by Baer at OSCE last week. But it has some generic phrases that have been tooled-and-died to fight internal bureaucratic battles with those that might worry if they pass CISPA that it will enable countries like Russia to say they are doing no different (that's actually not the case, because the nature of the regime matters). Says Baer:

But just as we support individuals who are targeted every day for
exercising their rights online, we are conscious of a broader threat to
the future of Internet openness. Right now, in various international
forums, including OSCE, some countries are working to change how the
Internet is governed. They want to replace the current multi-stakeholder
approach, which supports the free flow of information in a global
network, and includes governments, the private sector, and citizens. In
its place, they aim to impose a system that expands control over
Internet resources, institutions, and content, and centralizes that
control in the hands of governments. These debates will play out in
international forums over the next few months and years.

Katherine Maher goes much further -- it's clear from her piece that she'd just as lief not have governments at all in her notion of multi-stakeholder approach, except as possibly cash cows to just keep supplying broadband to the masses -- she romanticizes -- and misreports -- the origins of the Internet:

And unlike almost every other global resource in history, the Internet largely
escaped government regulation at first -- probably because no one could figure
out how to make money from it. From the outset, it was managed not by
governments, but by an ad hoc coalition of volunteer standards bodies and civil
society groups composed of engineers, academics, and passionate geeks --
awkwardly dubbed the multistakeholder system.

In fact, it was managed by the US government in DARPA and ARPANET and all the rest, and the USG then handed it over to nonprofits like ICANN with the understanding that they would be good stewards. It's not clear that they are. Whenever people hear the term "standards bodies", they genuflect and grow very pious -- as if technical standards are beyond the ability of mere mortals to question.

But that's sheer nonsense, as these bodies like IEEE and IETF are not democratically run with due process like Congress -- they can be swayed by whoever shows up and behaves the most aggressively. I constantly cite from personal experience the example of the Virtual Worlds working group in IETF which was run by a loose consortium of companies and coders who argued about things like copyright, but which then got entirely taken over by the US military. Completely. And they have been unfriendly to copyright and push the open source line as a cost-cutting measure (supposedly) -- they want to be able to download and save all the OAR files and have them as freebies and not pay for virtual builders or worry about licensing fees or problems.

Problems involving people's ownership rights; their livelihoods as designers; issues of identity, geospatial location; proximity data; privacy; on and on and on -- these are not mere technical problems. They are profoundly human problems and they should not be left only to Google and its chosen Democrat or OFA apparatchiks to manage for all of us. We need to fight hard against all of this.

02/21/2013

Last night I went to the panel discussion on Aaron Swartz at Fordham Center on National Security and just as expected, it was terribly one-sided, and as the organizer even told me afterward -- deliberately so. They could only conceive of "the other side" as someone actually from the Department of Justice (who wouldn't have come anyway). And they clearly wanted to first frame the debate around the figure of Swartz as hero-coder and then only some other day discuss the national security implications of people "like Galileo". "Or Oppenheimer," as one old man enthusiastically declared to the panelists. Sigh. One old grey-haired 1960s activist woman in the audience ranted about "the war on the young" that the crackdown on hackers symbolized. Oh, please. The Internet Revolution has eaten its children; and these children are making war on all of our rights and should not be so lightly given a pass by people claiming to be human rights advocates.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"

The first people that the hackers will come for are the lawyers, when they install code-as-law -- and law and lawyers will become obsolete -- they already are, as we can see how a bill in Congress designed to govern the unruly Internet is overthrown by an Internet-incited mob before it could even come to a vote.

I don't believe the videos are online anywhere from this discussion, and there's lots to debate in it, but let me focus on one problematic thesis, that "we need more technologists in Washington," i.e. to write legislation affecting complex new technologies.

My robust answer to that is: no we don't, no way, keep these cultists as far, far, FAR away from our democratic institutions and human rights as possible. That's because of their total lack of civics education; their total immersion in binary 0101 type thinking without consideration of the nuances and complexities of actual reality; their literalism about how law works as if it were code, instead of in living dynamic institutions like the Supreme Court, and a host of other pernicious features of their authoritarian culture -- these are all deadly for democracy.

They've already made very fearful and significant inroads, and people need to push back very, very hard before they do indeed literally overthrow the Constitution. This seems like a preposterous abstraction now; it won't when you realize that a good many of them think the Constitution is flawed or obsolete and belongs to some outdated operating system and should be rewritten with a new Constituent Assembly controlled by themselves, or else thrown out completely, along with Congress and the Supreme Court, which are outdated and "in the way" of progress, and we should just run the state off their iphones. This is why I started this blog. This is not something I'm kidding about. I absolutely do not care if you find this extreme or find me loony.

MISLEADING HACKER LORE

There are number of very clear reasons why you cannot trust Chris Soghoian, the privacy guru now working for the ACLU whom I have criticized in the past.

And it's very simple: because he misleads the public -- er, lies -- about things that are in fact checkable, and if he can do this on smaller things, he will do this on larger things.

Tekkies pride themselves on being experts and having esoteric and arcane knowledge that the public doesn't know and can't be bothered to parse. But often what their "knowledge" is, is in fact lore -- lore that they get from each other in tightly-knit fiercely tribal circles and networks, and not ever debated, subjected to even the most basic journalistic scrutiny, let alone proven as "fact".

Example: Soghoian's claim in his talk that fear of hackers began with ignorance and superstition, and that it was only creative interesting people probing new technologies then in the 1990s (phone switching software) that caused the panic, which was unnecessary. Silly police and justice officials thought that phreakers could launch nuclear weapons with whistles out of their Cracker-Jack boxes, he chided, and the audience laughed.

Oh, nonsense. Read Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, which I'm doing now. Sterling, a science fiction author and cult hero himself among the tech set, is extremely kind to phreakers and hackers, and writes very generously and lovingly about them, but even he concedes they were doing some dangerous and damaging things, like stealing AT&T's manual for running the 911 emergency phone system or running up huge phone bills on other people's numbers. Even Sterling is ambivalent about the destructiveness some hackers cause and does indeed take seriously some of the hacks and doesn't claim it's just kids whistling.

The issues posed by the hacker revolution are real and not trivial and one cannot accept the hackers' narrative about themselves as a starting point or as an end in itself. You have to step outside their narrative -- peddled massively now through their invention of social media featuring themselves as hero and influencers "recommended to follow" -- and ask basic questions about this struggle for power.

HISTORY OF DISSECTION AS A MODEL FOR UNDERSTANDING HACKERS

After all, physicians in the old days stole bodies and dissected whenever they wanted, and ranted about the general public being superstitious and getting in the way of "innovation". But society eventually regulated them so that they had to follow procedures and show respect for the dead and gain consent -- something that people, however unscientific and outdated they were viewed as by the innovative physicians -- insisted on, and got their way about with institutions.

The history of dissection is actually an interesting one to contemplate as a model for the demands -- and the pushback of the public -- for scientists. Physicians insisted on the smelly and horrifying business of dissection to "learn" despite cultural and religious taboos. They persisted and persisted and got their way, but were eventually regulated. And as time went on, in fact the very science itself -- or rather the obsessive and aggressive practice of it -- got pushed back from the realm of medicine as "diagnosis," and got put more properly in its place as necessary only for forensics. Not every death gets an autopsy. Physicians don't need to endlessly engage in autopsies throughout their careers after med school. The physician needed the autopsy at one time to prove himself right, despite cultural resistance. That's all it was about, really, his own need to be right. Even he could find less objectionable ways of proving his rectitude, and his aggressiveness desisted.

And isn't it ironic that today, the geek-produced computer models are preferable rather than cutting up the human body? That says it all. Society produces innovators, then rejects them, but eventually tames them. Hackers will be no different *shrugs*.

NO, SWARTZ DID NOT INVENT OR CO-AUTHOR THE RSS

Or let's take up take another claim from Soghoian: "Swartz co-authored the RSS" (some geeks even say "invented" RSS).

But anyone who has been around this field observing it for even a short while simply knows this isn't true. Dave Winer invented and applied the RSS, and even that legend has its qualifications.

Soghoian condescendingly told the audience that if they had ever accessed "This American Life" as a podcast, they had used Aaron's invention.

Nonsense, they would have done nothing of the sort. Let's leave alone the notion that people listen to podcasts outside of a hardcore fanclub of nerds, or that anybody still uses feed readers to read blogs. In the age of i-phones, they now use apps, and that's not technology that came out of the RSS. Even Winer discusses whether the RSS is obsolete, as do nerds on Quora, look it up on Google.

Twitter, Facebook, etc. have all made the RSS feeds, the hope of certain open source geeks for a Better World where we would all be As One reading each others blogs constantly on an open, shared standard system, completely beside the point. People discover content through social networks and people they follow now and just read those streams, not RSS feeds through readers. The entire reason Google retired i-Google is because people didn't use it. Sure, people still do use RSS here and there. But it is being made pointless.

And Swartz's contribution to it is even more pointless today, and was obscure even at the time he was involved in it. He worked on one version of it, 1.0, which is not used now and which was a branch of the system. This is all something you can read about from those actually in this field, and from tekkies who waited a week until the uproar over his death died down, but then laid out the facts. You can read them in an otherwise hagiographic study of Swartz in Slate.

So unless Soghoian has been living under a rock for the last few years, he has no basis for claiming that Swartz "co-authored" code that people "use for podcasts today" when in fact that was never the case and isn't now.

What geeks mean to say about Swartz and the RSS is that they were enthralled and entranced that he worked on a geeky branch of it at the tender age of 14, thereby illustrating his status as a boy genius. But like child actors, child geeks often come to bad ends. They don't mature. They bloom too fast. And the adults eager to make them bloom too fast and gain benefit from them should be held to account (and I will write another post about my exchange with Carl Malamud).

But with Soghoian, we are merely seeing him pass on lore, like he constantly picks up and passes on lore and gossip and opinion from the "hysterical hypotheticals" hothouse he lives in.

FAKE CLAIM THAT CONGRESS IS NOT TECH SAVVY AND THERE ARE NO TECHS IN DC

Now let's look at his claim that there are "no" technologists or "not at all enough" technologists in Washington.

You won't need me to object to this, as a million Gov 2.0 goverati could likely howl at this claim, and you don't have to "be the only Congressman running your own server" to be tech-savvy or have access to appropriate tech expertise -- like you would get expertise on any other subject, whether health or education. Congressmen write legislation on health, education, and welfare -- and nuclear missles -- without being doctors or nuclear scientists. They get the appropriate expertise. There is nothing special about computer science, by the same token, and the "science" is really often lore or propagandistic struggles for power dressed up as "science".

That legislation can be hard to write, because it requires attunement and skill to everything else Congress has done before that in that field and to the norms of how legislation is written is one thing. That's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about the technical skill of writing legislation (for which we do not need technologists, even when the legislation is about technology; we need experts on the jurisprudence of Congress).

What Soghoian's claim is that technologists -- geeks -- aren't let in on the process of legislating over and regulating technology, and therefore it is all screwed up.

I cry sheer, unadulterated "nonsense" at this, particularly on SOPA. I went up to him after the meeting and challenged him, and I found he had a hard time replying. He replied with all the usual set-pieces of lore he had mastered from his tekkie circles without debate or questioning, and it was hard to get him to break out of the vicious circle. He blew me off by pretending this was a deep conversation for email and gave me his card -- but Mr. Privacy's card consists of a graphic of an eye and a generic gmail with his name -- not even his ACLU coordinates. Please. That's not serious. You're not serious, when you do that, Chris. You are not trustworthy.

I pointed out, as AJ Keen has also pointed out, that geeks had plenty of access to the SOPA process. None other than Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, testified at a hearing in Congress that came about precisely to humour the howlers that techs weren't involved. That was not enough for Soghoian, no doubt because he conceives it as only the top level guy at one hearing, and as we all "know," these suits at the top aren't really involved in the day-to-day work.

Nothing less than a top coder of the Harper Reed lore quest level would have been sufficient for Soghoian, but that implies that defining piracy and punishment for it is some hard job that "breaks technology" if you "mess it up" -- a fictional approach dictated by extreme politics to start with, and therefore needing of challenge.

SOPA was directed at high-volume, high-traffic, high-income piracy websites of the MegaUpload type that clearly fit the criteria laid out in the bill for commercial interest, resistance to takedown warnings, persistence over time, monetary value over a certain amount, and so on. Not somebody's Facebook page.

As we know engineers wrote alarming letters about the DNSSEC impact, something that I've questioned, as a non-technologist, just on the usual tendency to disbelieve any geek-induced "hysterical hypothetical," and which technologists themselves have questioned (and one obvious point is that big companies have not moved to use DNSSEC, despite all the hysteria about how SOPA would "break" it).

But...Technologists and tech agitators like Mike Masnick had a HUGE impact on SOPA -- via Darryl Issa and Zoe Lofgren. Soghoian objected that this was only after SOPA was drafted and began to pick up steam. Huh? So what? It's not my fault that geeks have only discovered "how a bill becomes a law" yesterday, and think that the way to influence it is to create a monstrous flashmob and take away the right to vote. There was considerable, ample, repetitive, and hostile input into the drafting of SOPA, but hey, it never culminated in the drafting of a viable alternative bill that was passable now, did it. That would be the test of seriousness about participation in the legislative process, and that this was NOT the result is proof of the nefarious intents of the geeks, in my view. The fake alternative Issa promoted desultorily for awhile doesn't count -- Google was never serious about that and it didn't happen for obvious political reasons.

WHY DO TECHS FEAR VOTING LIKE THE PLAGUE?

I asked Soghoian why he and others were afraid of this law coming to a vote. As that was what it amounted to when they flash-mobbed Congress with 7 millions Google-incited signatures and all the tyrannical, temper-tantrun threats of blacking out Tumblr and Wikipedia.

I asked him point-blank if he wished to circumvent Congress, as some hackers openly call for and incite the mob to do. He said he would like Congress to vote "regularly and often". Sure, on his terms.

Soghoian objected again that Tumblr was only blacked out in protest for that one day. But I countered that for weeks -- months -- they had greeted their customers with a fake ICE-style message that their site might be seized by federal authorities. They disgracefully and shamefully propagandized wildly in order to scarify kids and stampede them into the anti-SOPA crusade -- which was very much a children's crusade, and the child-man Swartz led it, prompted to it by his older mentors. I saw direct evidence of this myself in the dozens of friends in my teenagers' feeds screaming about how the government was going to censor their Internet pages -- something that was never the target of the bill -- or even remotely some accidental by-product of the bill. Shame on Silicon Valley for exploiting kids when they couldn't make their legal arguments the normal way as adults in a democratic system.

And that was sheer manipulative 1930s style mass propaganda, and even some more sober heads like Pogue at the Times and even some tech commentators said later that while they opposed SOPA and didn't think it was a good idea, they were highly troubled by the way the tech industry went after this -- with thuggish, vicious abandon and the propagandistic spreading of lies and hate.

There was never, ever, anything in SOPA that would have shut down a teenager's Tumblr blog let alone all of Tumblr. The definitions and stipulations and remedies in the later drafts of SOPA would have prevented anything remotely like that from occurring.

Yet tekkies kept bleating like stuck pigs that their Internet was going to be taken away from them and that horrible evil censorship would descend like the Iron Curtain. It was all total bullshit, and I think some of them do privately admit it, but like true Bolsheviks, they felt "the ends justify the means".

Soghoian was untroubled by the coercive process of overthrowing the proper work of legislators on SOPA, and insisted that the problem is that not enough of his tribe is in place in legislative offices.

I countered that in fact they exist, such as in the FTC's CTO. He objected that no, their leadership are lawyers. Well, that's okay, given that *law* is indeed mainly what they have to work with, not "code-as-law". Soghoian claimed with a straight face that he only new a few interns in all of Washington capable of understanding the technology that was the subject of these laws.

BIG IT SPENDS MILLIONS ON LOBBYISTS!

Oh, do stop. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all spent MILLIONS on lobbyists in Washington -- lobbyists who *are* technologists or scripted by technologists. They all have their technologists in revolving doors in the government -- look at Andrew McLaughlin. Congressional offices have ample recourse to technologists who in any event are hugely busy lobbying them with far more connected and resourced outfits than the ACLU -- like the Sunlight Foundation. Congressmen like Issa have HUGE amounts of IT company contribution to their campaigns, especially from Google. Geeks want Congressmen to "get the money out of politics" and have logos on their suits like NASCAR drivers. Sure, I'm all for that, because we'll see law firms, unions, and yes, Big IT control congress as much as those evil energy or defense corporations that geeks love to hate (even though they probably work for Big IT that has numerous consulting contracts with those very firms).

Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist and investor in Twitter and other modern tech has an "activist in residence" now who does nothing but scan the horizon for "threatening" legislation -- something that has caused a certain amount of debate even among his coterie. One might argue that these things came into place AFTER SOPA. But *that* SOPA could fail as a draft deluged by a flashmob lets us know in fact the raw power of geeks that they apply without reason, without logic, and without debate. THAT is what we have to worry about.

I don't care if you find this post extreme. You're welcome to argue it more moderately if you like. I'm concerned that when extermist sectarians like Soghoian, who are willing to misrepresent the facts and weave narratives favourable to their tribe, insist on more power for themselves and their friends, we will all be worse off.

WE NEED MORE PEOPLE TO GET WISE TO TECH HYPE, NOT MORE TECHNOLOGISTS

We don't need "more technologists". We need ordinary lawyers, business people, and even people in the humanities who are in office to merely get wise to the tech hype and the geek hysteria and learn to start asking hard questions about their propaganda. Even other geeks question these extremists and we need to hear from them more. Most of what we are seeing in the tech/legal space around things like SOPA and CISPA are not really genuine concerns about free speech or privacy -- rights that these big platforms and Big IT are only too happy to whisk away from us at the drop of an absuse report or a marketer's payment -- but merely lobbying hype in their business interests.

There is nothing special about cyberspace. It is a human artifact that is no more complex than cars or telephones were complex in their day. It's not exotic and impossible to control, any more than the Wild West was impossible to control. The outlaws on the Electronic Frontier will be rounded up for their cattle rustling, if they won't turn themselves in.

01/12/2013

Imagine if Luther, when he posted his famous 99 theses on the door of the cathedral, had to first seek the imprimatur of the Catholic Church on his protest.

Imagine if the barons who wrote the Magna Carta had to rely on the King to display their text -- and if he only displayed it partially.

Imagine if he only responded to it if they had 25,000 signatures.

All this and more is what you get in the total collectivizing, distracting, destructive concept called falsely "We the People" at whitehouse.gov/petitions

Once again I got into a Twitter argument with Anil Dash, for a time the goatse boy at the White House, over the significance and usefulness of this collectivist and socialist idiocy.

Naturally he derided my use of the words "collectivist" and "socialist" with regard to something that is supposed to be Mom and Apple Pie and red-white-blue American.

I don't care. It's the best way to describe the awful thing that happens when you come into contact with this site lose both your individuality and individual rights and you deflect away from Congress, which is the result of the expression of your democratic will.

As this "We the Coders" (snort) essay lets us know, the people behind this site have very clear ideological preferences and cultural norms and they let this bleed into the whole site. Many of the people coming to the site have wildly differing views -- you get a lot of people who sign petitions to secede from the Union of the United States due to Obama's winning of the elections for example. Their petitions, no matter how many they gather, are never featured.

Instead, as "We the Coders" indicates, the petitions that fit with the values and lifestyles of the geeks are what is featured:

Who isn't for reducing student debt? And I'm happy to endorse opposition to DOMA. That's not the point.

The point is THIS IS NOT DEMOCRACY, IT'S GEEKOCRACY.

These are the ten ways in which We the People creates a dysfunctional shill of real democracy and is in fact only a very distorted and diminished coded form of the real-life right to petition the ruler:

1. Petitioners are required their email address, they are steered to providing their real name, and likely their IP address is captured which enables the government to track them in various ways (whether they do or not isn't the issue; what is the issue is that they are ENABLED to do so).

2. Only petitions that acquire 25,000 signatures can get a response from the executive branch -- a completely arbitrary number (it's a wonder they didn't chose 65336 like a server partition).

3. Certain popular petitions rotate on the front page, but not necessarily due to raw high numbers -- there are clearly both algorithms and editing going on here.

4. The petitioner's petition is not separate from the executive; he relies on whitehouse.gov to display his petition; to store it; to collect the signatures from him -- and at any point this can either malfunction or bad faith can be shown in dealing with the petition. The petition is in the hands of the petitioner and dependent on this adversary for its very existence. This is the chief form of collectivizing of "We the People" -- awful.

5. The splash page at whitehouse.gov has no obvious button "click to petition us" -- which lets us know how serious they are about really wanting to be petitioned -- and lets us know again why *this entire process should not be in the hands of the executive branch -- hello!*

6. "Search" is difficult to find -- it doesn't seem to be accessible UNTIL you log in, and then even if you search the key words you know you have in your own petition to find it (for example) it will not pull up. Yes, you can pull up your own drafted petition under "my petitions" but if you forget or lose the link, and just tell someone by word of mouth, they will have trouble finding it.

7. The fetishizing and collectivizing of petitions and the chase after the chimera of an executive response are all distracting and diverting from Congress. Congress is set up much better and more legitimately to handle constituents on issues and complaints -- this system is a deliberate end run around a body that geeks tend to hate and despise for not being technical (supposedly) or wishing (properly) to legislate them and their Internet.

8. At any time, the president could decide to ditch this entire silly experiment and all the content would be deleted. Did I mention what a terrible idea it was having the very mechanics of the petitioning process in the hands of the executive and its servers?! There is no legislation or executive order that governs this (that I know of) and nothing to protect it from arbitrariness.

9. The answers given are often anodyne, incomplete, misleading or even stupid. It's busy work to go through the motions of looking there is "interactivity" and "21st century" "gov 2.0" crap going on, but it's fake. Just take a look at them, and you'll see.

10. The site doesn't have a way of enabling people to negotiate to join their petitions -- but then, again, as I don't believe it's their function to even be involved in the petitioning process, I'm not asking them to do this.

All of us in Second Life, which was the prototype for all these disastrous things we see now in gov 2.0 and web 2.0 and all the other "iterations" contained these flaws -- and more. Every single one of the worst-case scenarios came to pass -- the content was deleted, the petitions not only ignored but hidden; finally voting disappeared; finally even the very view of the petition was hidden (!).

This is what happens when you put your democracy into the hands of coders, people. They are inherently unscrupulous because they do not see themselves as bound by the rule of law, but merely view "code as law" as they establish it.

The very features and operation of this "democratic" experiment were not democratically discussed and decided by those very "We the People". It was just "We the Coders".

Soviet Socialist Realism painters like Serov went to a great deal of trouble to create the pictoral illusion of "democracy" or "justice" with "the people" able to approach the Vozhd' (Great Leader) directly -- in their hobnailed boots and coarse muslin Russian tunics and their tousled grey beards. But of course, Lenin was busy massacring people who didn't go along with the program in large numbers and dismantling the local self-governance bodies that might have made such appeals to the Center unnecessary if they had real power.

In the same way, creating the illusion that 25,000 signatures that got some functionary in the executive branch to write something is not only a distraction from Congress and the real paths of influencing government (the media, non-governmental groups, demonstrations, etc.) but as I noted a collectivizing and debilitating experience. These petitions are designed to look like they mean something significant and authentic and "democratic" has taken place, but precisely because the petition is in the hands of the executive, you don't have a way to form associations, discuss issues, change the text together, merge petitions etc. -- in order words, the normal functions of democracy are not coded -- and in some respects can't be coded without doing damage to them.

The best thing people could do is to cease to use this semblance of democracy that simultaneously undermines it. There's no reason why people can't make their own organizations, websites, drafting and collaborating content management systems, etc. -- without coders steeped in their own world view and without the executive itself scraping their data.

The left as well as the right and the center should be disgusted with the mere facsimile of democracy this thing yields and junk it for more authentic organizing.

At best, we are getting a pat on the head with the answers -- like the little Russian boy in this other Socialist Realist painting below. At worst, we are sawing off the branch of democracy that we do have still vital in America and which we still sit on, using social media.

President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign built a set of sophisticated tools to analyze thousands of Twitter conversation, using that knowledge to figure out whether its ideas were being hijakced or surrogates were staying on message, a former Obama for American staffer said Friday.

Michaelangelo D'Agonstino, Obama's former senior analyst for digital analytics, described all this at -- what else? -- Rootscamp. What did the Obama For America team do with all this mined information?

"There were times that I think our social media team would reach out to people, and reach out to someone who was vaguely a surrogate that wasn't in line with messaging, and they would contact them," D'Agostino said

They used a program called Visible Intelligence to mine and "score" tweets.

Michaelangelo "thought constantly about hashtags that would get hijacked or co-opted" It would get turned around and used mockingly, he complained.

Of course, the left is expert at this far more than the right -- I recall with what exasperation I fled Flood Zone A and tried in vain to get real news about Hurrican Sandy with the #Sandy hashtag, only to find some asshole doing "Romney Storm Tips" as a form of parody. Thanks a lot guy. Or Steven Levy acting like a total asshole, retweeting the report that the stock exchange was under water and the storm had "occupied it". It was false. He took glee in it. He doesn't see his book's wealth as tied to the stock market at all, I guess. I confronted him over doing this -- he shrugged.

Yet the left earnestly believes that it is innocent and it is only the GOP that "hijacks" hashtags.

Of course, let's stop a minute here. Erm, hijacks? You mean...uses the same hashtag in a conversation you are using, but *criticizes* the things you gush about? You mean...people *daring* to criticize the President! Gasp!

In this piece, we see the eight "typical Americans" that the President engages with. We're supposed to be persuaded that they're from "all walks of life" and represent "different viewpoints". Of course they don't. The social media managers are expert at plucking out certain libertarians they can talk to on the left like Daryl Issa and pairing them with their lefty pals who have the same sort of techno-utopian vision. Matching the segments of the left and right that agree on getting rid of SOPA, possibly for different reasons, and then pretending you have had a "bi-partisan debate". This was like John Perry Barlow, Bob Weir, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Gary Johnson getting together on a Yahoo music show special to "Get Out the Vote" and pretending this was all "bi-partisan".

Says TechPresident:

The White House had bought its #My2k post from several days ago as a promoted Tweet, while House Majority Leader was promoting his tweet
"Mr. President, time to get serious. Let's protect small businesses and
families from a harmful increase in tax rates and cut spending. #my2k"

Conservative-leaning website Twitchy, meanwhile, documented efforts
by Republican supporters to "hijack" the Q&A, and mocked initial
confusion among reporters about what the right hashtag for the event
was, as well as his use of the expression "tweet your member." But
Twitchy did not seem to curate any of the actual questions and answers.

Documented efforts? Again, this "hijacking"? Why the hell can't "nonprogressives" use the same hashtag and speak of the topic critically?! Do the progs think the hashtag system is only for them to woot about their enthusiasms?!

Once again, we see the same methods and messages used by whitehouse.gov and all its related accounts on getting ObamaCare passed -- they seem to think that social media exists not to actually debate questions, and not to actually take accountability by answering the public's hard questions, but to use social media by one half of the country as a means to gang up on the other half of the country and "bring them around" -- and essentially browbeat them to death into accepting whatever the proposition of the day is. It is -- I can't say it enough -- profoundly creepy.

One of the things discussed is the private DM that some operators of these accounts engineered to influence people. I was one of those people who got a DM from Joe Biden -- Joe Biden! Real, verified Joe Biden! He followed me! In order to DM me! And wrote "Cathy, use your influence on Twitter to get out the vote!". Little 'ol me, still seen as someone to help Joe Biden GOTV!

11/25/2012

Yet another lefty Scott Walker- hater geek codes up a site and thinks he can be viewed as an honest broker in the voting business. He says his business failed, but his idea is great and is just waiting to be picked up by "the people" who will "carry the torch". Nevermind that this is a guy that thinks anti-Walker protesters "convey information" but by implication, then, their opponents "purvey falsehoods". Fortunately, reason, common sense, and fairness prevailed and the geeks and the lefties and the "scientists" of the Democratic Party who muscled in unions, Occupy, Michael Moore, etc. could not prevail. Scott Walker was not recalled. You lose, good day, sir.

The market voted on this failed web site -- it didn't serve people for all kinds of reasons. He blames the failure on features of his team or his location or lack of full-time programmers or sufficient VC capital. But the reality is, a voting site like this is UNTRUSTWORTHY and will only gain like-minded geeks and their "progressive" pals who want to socialize with each other and reinforce each other, not people really interested in authentic debate and real deliberation leading to consensus in a liberal democracy. These things are awfully hard to replicate anyway online, but they are even more difficult because of the heavily-biased utopian Marxist-style ideals that geeks like this bring to the task.

So typical of the "scientism"of the left. The people who protested against Walker weren't merely "conveying information". They were *expressing an opinion* that they believed municipal unions should enjoy unlimited collective bargaining rights even though they are state unions paid out of the taxpayers' pockets, not in private industry. And these people with "information" in fact then *lost* the recall vote, and Scott Walker was not recalled, despite their hatred of him. Other people had voted for him and wanted to keep him and his plans to reduce the deficit. And you know, when you win an election, that's that, hey don't be a sore loser, as Obama gloaters are telling us now.

Voting is not "broken". Geeks are broken in their understanding of what safeguards are needed in elections. If it were up to them, they'd abolish political parties (Sergei Brin's proposal), and they'd just code up a platform where we'd all vote on prepared propositions and "like" them (Sergei's friends). No thanks! I want real democracy with yes/no votes and deliberation that results in propositions, not "science" that produces them.

You and your geek friends with your worldview may love "OurBallotBox," but the rest of us don't share your views, and you don't have a better idea for us than "patch or GTFO" or "remove" as in "Harper Reed's tips for problem solving". Sorry, but that's not a democracy, it's totalitarianism.

Every single one of your ideas for "fixing" the problems of "political social networks" in fact perpetuates the real problems of geek networks antithetical to democracy:

The typical Redditt style mass site has features like "downvoting" that make it possible for aggressive minorities or intolerant majorities to eliminate dissent from the view. Surfacing and sorting in fact amount to algorithms that usually favour the devs' friends -- the early adapters get more followers, they get listed as the recommended people to follow, they are the power users on the power curve, etc.

Open data? And who gets to slice and dice it? Your friend Nate Silver? With science? And you're sure Nate Silver never makes a political judgement, ever?

You just hate it that "certain radio hosts" can articulate an opinion and get followers, don't you! You wish you could just rule everybody with your Twitter account as a "thought leader"!

Change.org like all left-leaning platforms pretending to be for "everybody" have several severely built-in flaws: a) their cadres promote some petitions and not others that fit their views b) if you ever develop a difficulty in registering and fielding a petition, they simply have no customer service to help you, like all these big platforms, you're toast c) your petition is only as good as your social media network to promote it, if you aren't chosen by the devs. Very, very unfair system.

POPVOX has a very heavy bias problem whereby it lets people post comments only in favour of their vote, and not in criticism of the opposite vote. It is not a real simulation of real democracy where people argue and deliberate with fair conditions. POPVOX also fronts and promotes the ideas they like, they don't create a level playing field:

All the makers of all the platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc. claim to be wanting to "effect change" and to "make a better world". What they mean is that they want to weld their own ideas into the platform and then let it be hijacked by data-miners from Obama for America. You see these tools as Trojan horses and stalking horses for your own perspective. And that's why people don't view you as fair and will go on disrupting what you do. Of course, you'll try to deal with them by mute, ban, block but the Internet routes around.

Accordingly, what I saw to all these wannabe totalitarianism who want to code these platforms to engender the "disruptive" -- revolutionary -- change that will destroy "the old order," here's what you would really have to do to ensure real democracy:

1. Not just verify identity but have a plan for fighting those who will insist on preserving anonymity and invoke all kinds of notions of repression of dissent in order to justify their unwillingness to face accountability. This might mean separating the voting apparatus with secret ballot but verified identity and pseudonymous discussion (backed by real identity).

2. Any propositions must be allowed to be submitted, and allowed to attract votes, with no time limits or thresholds to be viewed. None. Absolutely none. Every geek-driven site from the WhiteHouse.gov to SecondLife.com injects various restrictive notions to suit their own notions, but these have to be jettisoned. There is absolutely no reason why any system can't have an unlimited number of proposals, votes, and comments, and be reviewed as needed by elected officials. The limits geeks devise here coming out of clutchy little notions of tidiness of binary notions of numerics have to go. In a world where *search* is used to find propositions of interest, any effort to restrict size, frequency, numbers of votes, etc. etc. is unnecessary.

3. Search algorithms must be open and publicized and any notion of secrecy for the sake of preventing "gaming" have to be jettisoned. Devise an open algorithm that has red dye on the gaming, or don't make a voting system. End of story. This is the central flaw of all voting systems.

4. Leave gamification out of the system. Nobody needs any net nerds who get badges and reputational points for posting the most, voting the most, getting the most passed, etc. Democracy works, well, when it works.

5. First Amendment level protection of free speech. No speech codes, terms of service with overbroad language about "incivility," no abuse reporting accepted for "hate speech," etc. etc. Unless somebody has a successful judge's decision from a court proceeding in a libel case or a case of "incitement to imminent violence," they cannot have the platform provider remove speech. Accordingly, no blocks, ban, mutes, downvotes, etc. on speech grounds whatsoever. Offenses like malicious scripts with spam bots may be punishable under the TOS, but not statements that hurt the feelings of thin-skinned geeks and forums divas.

6. Independent, separate, impartial civilian review board that reviews the work of the voter platform. Ideally, a voting platform constituent assembly made up of any registered party, not just geeks who turn out mainly to be technocommunists and libertarians and Democrats, but all parties, should be involved in the decisions about the coding and features, and allowed to vote on feature requests and bug prioritization.

7. NGOs, movements, trade unions, astroturfs like moveon.org or Daily Kos or Red State should also have meaningful participation but not an equal vote to registered parties that developed platforms which their members get to vote on at conventions.

8. No repeal of Citizens' United, and allowance of any political speech in the forum of ads.

9. No one can close anyone else's proposal or proposition, or suggest that it "can't be done" or devise a minimum necessary number of votes for it to be featured or looked at. Surfacing of proposals can be done all kinds of ways, from automatic 15 minutes of fame at first posting, to random features in one column, to most popular displayed. But this has to be looked and debate constantly as to its fairness, or flashmobbing takes over and only the popular get popular attention. No vote is removed if it is "defunct," and not voted on. Get over any fear of "clutter" as this is the Internet where it's only a miniature storage issue. Independent free media is the necessary partner of any voting system.

10. No automatic reputation systems, i.e. through downvotes or upvotes, likes or dislikes, or number of postings. The independent and free media and blogosphere can cover people making propositions with the information they gather about them and the judgements for which they take responsibility.

I'm sure there's lots more, but I can see this is going to be a growing battlefield. We need to get the geeks out of this business and have a serious coalition of normal people enter this field and bat away all their totalitarianisms or we will lose our freedom. I'm not kidding.

11/19/2012

On the one hand I've always said that WikiLeaks assaulted the most liberal democratic American state in history. What could be more "progressive" than the Obama Administration and the Clinton State Department in particular? So why did these anarchists chose to hit *this* administration and not Bush -- after all, Julian Assange and his pals have been around for years with their ideologies. I think the short answer is: "because they can," and the wikification of government itself, which led to WikiLeaks.

But even before Obama, I found the entire Gov 2.0 movement to be a sham. It's the most insular, jargonistic, arrogant movement I've seen around in ages, especially with a few loudmouths on Twitter. You get boosters like Clay Johnson, the digital czar of the Dean campaign, which was that first yuppie Internet and latte campaign we saw; you get Alan Silberberg and the many others constantly conferencing and consulting and blogging and writing papers and giving each other travel grants and consulting fees.

The fight that broke out at Whimsley's blog was indicative of just how fake this entire "open government" shill was, and just how much liberals in Canada and elsewhere are beginning to call it out. Of course, I go much further than Whimsley and in a different direction but I was glad that he provided one of the few blogs that doesn't shut down a critique of Tim O'Reilly's lobbyist and propagandist in Washington, Alex Howard.

Now Reason is taking this in a further direction, drilling on the question of whether FOIA and the alleged promises to open up more information made by Obama in 2009 are coming true. They aren't. This says it all:

On March 28, 2011, a group of leading transparency advocates passed through the security checkpoints along the perimeter of the White House compound to present Barack Obama with an award for his efforts to open up government. The president who took office promising “an unprecedented level of openness in government” was getting his due for introducing sunlight into the murky workings of state. Supposedly.

They were right about one thing: It wasn’t a photo op. The meeting was closed to the media, off limits even to a promised pool photographer and reporter. The ceremony did not appear on Obama’s public schedule, and the White House did not release a transcript of the conversation. “Shh!” read the headline in Politico. “Obama Gets Anti-Secrecy Award.”

And it goes on:

Three months later, what started out as a drip of disappointment had turned into a flood of discontent. At a secretive meeting organized by the Aspen Institute, Dalglish and others met privately with Obama administration officials to discuss the case of New York Times national security reporter James Risen, who was subpoenaed for reporting classified information he allegedly obtained from CIA officer Jeffrey A. Sterling about the Bush administration’s efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. “The Risen subpoena is one of the last you’ll see,” the Obama official told Dalglish, according to an interview she later gave the Times. Good news for investigative journalists? Think again. “We don’t need to ask who you’re talking to,” the official reportedly said. “We know.”

There's a whole other discussion to be had about whether the Obama Administration's officials deliberately leak information about things like Stuxnet, used on Iran to disable its nuclear power system, in order to discredit things that others in the Administration are doing -- or whether merely to posture and scarify Iran.

It's funny that the Obama official says "we know" who a journalist is talking to -- look how long it seemed to take the FBI to find out who was sending a few hate emails to a socialite in Tampa who was in degrees of separation from the head of the CIA.

As I've noted, the left is trying to spin the whole Betrayus story as overreach by the FBI and turn it into a morality tale about Big Government and Big Brother and how we must have more tools to defeat them -- that's Chris Soghoian's mantra and it's no accident that now works for the ACLU. And it is about that, but before it's about that, it's about people who first scratched their way close to power, then used that proximity to power to settle scores with people they didn't like; and about those people tapping their FBI friends to sic on those harassing them -- and then...after that it's not clear when Holder know and when Obama knew.

The government would have us believe that because the FBI
confronted Petraeus with his emails showing a pattern of
inappropriate personal private behavior, he voluntarily departed
his job as the country's chief spy to avoid embarrassment. The
government would also have us believe that the existence of the
general's relationship with Paula Broadwell, an unknown military
scholar who wrote a book about him last year, was recently and
inadvertently discovered by the FBI while it was conducting an
investigation into an alleged threat made by Broadwell to another
woman. And the government would as well have us believe that the
president learned of all this at 5 p.m. on Election Day.

I don't particularly believe any of that, of course, but I think chasing after it endlessly is just going to lead to sounding like a conspiracy theorist. I don't know where to go with it. If Petraeus didn't testify about Benghazi before Congress, there might have been more of a smoking gun; but he did, no matter what questions were left hanging, and now...now there's only Obama claiming to wait to get all the information before he comments.

Andrew Napolitano conclues:

All this—the FBI spying on the CIA—constitutes the government
attacking itself. Anyone who did this when neither federal criminal
law nor national security has been implicated and kept the
president in the dark has violated about four federal statutes and
should be fired and indicted. The general may be a cad and a bad
husband, but he has the same constitutional rights as the rest of
us.

So, is he going to sue? No, I think he'll just get a job either in a think tank somewhere after a period in the wilderness repenting or even get a TV show like Elliot Spitzer.

Meanwhile, I wonder if the ACLU and the other lefties who always claimed they were for open government are going to keep barking about the FBI doing its job, essentially, even if clumsily, and keep on overlooking the abuses of power of all involved and convert it all into a morality tale of government surveillance in general -- as if all of us -- Anonymous, with Chris Poole stumping for why everyone should have the right to anonymity on line -- and the head of the CIA, litigating for the same thing for his very own private life.